Coping with Acne - Scrubbing

As a teenager with acne, I couldn't wear make up until I was 16 according to my mom's rules. So, as I mentioned in my last blog, as a teenager, I coped with having acne by picking at my pimples, which made it worse.

So I think I next resorted to scrubbing my skin. As a teenager, I didn't know what was causing the acne. I thought perhaps my skin was dirty. My skin was oily in parts and dry in others. I didn't realize at the time that I had combination skin. I couldn't convince my mom to buy makeup for me. I wasn't successful either at convincing my mom to buy me special cleansers either for my face. She wouldn't buy cleansers for combination skin or cleansers designed for acne. She thought that the acne would eventually just go away, and thought there was really nothing that could be done for the acne. So she would just tell me to use regular old soap.


The only thing that I was able to convince her to buy me was fragrance free soap. So I remember as teenager with acne, that my first method of "treating" my skin was using fragrance free soap. Particularly, I used Dove that was fragrance free. I don't know what it was about using Dove, but I loved using it. Maybe in my mind, as a teenager, I thought Dove was my "cure" but I used that soap religiously. I really wanted it to work.

So I scrubbed my skin with it. Big mistake! Scrubbing my skin was again one of the worse things I could do for my acne. Dove did make my skin clean and fresh but scrubbing with it was not the right thing for my acne prone skin. So this too prove to be the wrong coping method for dealing with acne.