Teenage Acne - All About Teen Skin

Teenagers' faces are all different. Your skin may be dark or light complexioned. You may have dry skin, oily skin, combination skin, sensitive skin, or be "thick-skinned" (I'm talking blowtorch-resistant, here). I can't generalize, but there are a couple of tendencies that make your skin different from that of adults:

 

More oiliness and less sensitivity: Teen skin tends to be a little oilier, and that's probably a good thing because many treatments that are effective for teenage acne can be somewhat irritating to the more sensitive skin that commonly affects adults. The extra oil serves as a waterproof barrier between you and the outside world and protects your skin from irritation.

 

Easier to heal: Your skin tends to be more "forgiving" and to heal more completely after experiencing acne. This is especially important when it comes to avoiding permanent scars and those dark spots that tend to appear in people of color when their acne lesions heal.

 

Good ol' acne vulgaris, teenage acne. If you have it, you have an idea what it looks like. But there may be more in store. Here are the main features of teen acne:

 

 

In its full glory, teenage acne generally looks like a mixture of blackheads and whiteheads (comedonal acne) with papules and pustules (inflammatory acne) and macules (healing lesions). Awesome! Here's how teenage acne can look in different kids. Maybe you'll find your type in one of the following descriptions:

 

Initially, the main lesions may be whiteheads and blackheads. Often they start out in a nice, embarrassing, central location — the nose and forehead. This part of the T-zone is where your skin tends to be most oily and, therefore, likely to develop acne.

 

As time goes on, you may discover a zit (also called pimples or papules; the red stuff) here and there, and an additional blackhead or whitehead now and then. There's a good chance that they will come and go. At this point, we're still in the "it's no big thing" stage. This type of acne is a rite of passage that almost all of us go through. If you're lucky, this will just pass by itself or you can help it clear up with some inexpensive over-the-counter stuff that you can buy at your local drugstore.

 

Sometimes, however, the going can get a little rougher: The whiteheads and blackheads want to hang around a lot longer and sometimes a population spurt of inflammatory papules and pustules really start making their presence felt. They can be seen in the center of the face but may also be scattered all over the place including your neck, chest, and back.

 

If you have dark skin, you may not see all of this red stuff because your acne may look brown or even darker on your skin.

 

As individual acne lesions heal, macules (dark red or purple spots) form and linger until the lesion heals completely. The macules may look brown or almost black in color if you are very dark-complexioned.

 

In some teens, especially those who have inherited a tendency to develop scarring acne, acne nodules may appear. They can get quite large, lumpy, and painful. They're inflamed lesions that are situated deeper than ordinary papules and pustules and can, if they go untreated, leave deep or thickened scars. This is called nodular acne.

 

Fortunately, even if acne reaches this point, dermatologists can treat it very effectively in many people with oral antibiotics and, if necessary, with an oral retinoid, known as isotretinoin, or Accutane. Besides these strong medicines, we have many new tricks up our sleeves, such as lasers and special lights to treat your acne.