Acne - now there's a four letter word. During my teen years I was the Prince of acne and for good reason. I was the face of acne, pun intended. I had it all, blackheads, whiteheads, you name it it was there. And If the scorn of my peers (especially the girls) was one thing, the impossibility of getting rid of the hideous acne I had was quite another thing altogether.
The myths and fairy tales surrounding acne didn't help either. My family members firmly believed that acne was a result of poor (or more specifically, junk) diet. Yes, I will admit that I, like any other team, enjoy my fair share of junk food, but I wasn't too sure that eating out was the cause of my acne. I mean, a lot of my buddies ate out with me, and what's more, ate the same junk food even more frequently than I did, but they had little or no acne. Something had to be wrong with conventional wisdom right? I had seen the myth being shattered right before my eyes. And I'm sure you've heard the one about chocolate causing pimples. And since I loved chocolate in all of its glorious forms, I would have found giving it up, even at the risk of remaining acne king, an unimaginable cruelty. But having done my homework and checking news and medical reports on the subject, I soon found to my great relief that chocolate consumption had nothing absolutely nothing to do with acne.
My friends and classmates weren't a lot of help either. Most of them, hinted with delightful sarcasm, that my acne advertisement face was a result of my inordinately frequent happen of masturbating. Hell, for a while there even I thought it was true. But then I quickly realized that this was yet another myth. Well I'm starting to learn actually, if by no other means than by the process of elimination. For if my acne was linked to my masturbation, was I to conclude that my male friends who had no acne at all did not masturbate? I would have sooner believe that they were from another planet! So, that was another acne myth dispelled.
Another myth that I did believe, and which made perfect sense and even sounded scientific at that time, was the accumulation of dirt on my face that blocked my pores. But if that was a case then why didn't my arms and legs, which more regularly came into contact with dirt, have acne all over them? In any case, I spent several days, weeks and months meticulously scrubbing my face with a variety of soaps and anti acne lotions in a bid to get rid of my acne, to no avail. Finally, I gave in to a fatalistic attitude and reasoned that the more I stressed myself out thinking about my acne, the worse the problem would become. It was at that point that I gave up bothering about my acne filled face. And guess what? A few short years later, as I slowly climbed out of my adolescence, the acne magically disappeared on its own! Although there are still a few tell tale scars of my acne prince days, for the most part you would never know they were there! |
