What causes acne?

The first step toward gaining control over acne is knowing why it happens in the first place. Check out this video and read below for a quick lesson in the life cycle of a pimple:

It all starts with the hair follicles and pores that you have all over your face and most of your body. Deep within each follicle are glands that produce sebum, the medical term for oil. This oil travels up through the hair follicle and onto the surface of your skin in order to keep your skin protected, soft and flexible—if you didn’t produce this oil, your skin would be dry as a lizard’s.

Things start to go a bit crazy when you hit puberty. That’s because you start producing hormones called androgens, which supercharge your oil glands and make them produce more oil than your skin can handle. Acne starts when this excess oil mixes with irregularly shed dead skin cells (billions of your skin cells are constantly dying and are replaced every day), and this creates a sticky mixture that fills up the follicle and plugs up its pore opening.

Inside this clogged follicle, there’s a particular kind of bacteria (called P. acnes) that feeds on the oil mixture, allowing the bacteria to grow and multiply. Your body senses this excessive activity as an infection, and that’s when its natural defenses kick in, sending white blood cells into the follicle to fight the bacteria.The result of all this action is swelling, inflammation and pus—and that’s your pimple.

The entire process of pimple formation can take weeks, which is why spot treatments aren’t an effective long-term acne solution. Treating only the pimples you can see is one of the most common and frustrating mistakes people make when trying to control acne. To get to the root of the problem and prevent future breakouts, you’ll get the best results with proven medicines that penetrate pores to kill acne-causing bacteria before it has a chance to wreak havoc on the surface of your skin.