Adult acne is a real curse that is extremely hard to get rid of.  As if I wasn’t plagued by enough acne as a teenager, I continue to get outbreaks well into my adult life, and I can’t seem to prevent them completely.  I’ve tried dozens of different acne face washes, body washes, and other skin care products, and while they all seem to help I still get some nasty outbreaks now and then.  Naturally, I’ve been very curious as to the causes of adult acne so that I may better understand how to get rid of it.

There are a lot of different possible causes of adult acne, which makes it all the harder to fight.  While the actual cellular process that causes acne is clogged pores, usually by the action of bacteria, fighting bacteria on your skin is a hopeless and misdirected solution.  First of all, every inch of our skin is covered by bacteria whether we like it or not.  Secondly, we actually need the bacteria on our skin to be there so trying to get rid of them all isn’t the right approach.  Therefore, vigorous scrubbing with antibacterial products isn’t going to help you and may actually just make things worse.

The causes of adult acne, as with any acne, may be largely due to bacteria, but the bacteria are merely responding to some kind of imbalance on our skin that has a deeper cause.  When everything is functioning right, bacteria are in a sort of balance with our skin, and nothing gets clogged.  So the real root causes of adult acne are something deeper than just bacteria.  So far the two that make the most sense to me are stress and genetics. 

Under periods of high stress, I am so much more prone to acne outbreaks that there is an obvious link between the two.  Something about being stressed causes the balance on my skin to teeter enough for the bacteria to start clogging pores.  There must be something my body produces under stressed conditions, which is then excreted through pores and taken up by bacteria.  While I’m sort of theorizing here, there is a lot of clinical evidence to suggest a link between stress and adult acne.     

There must also be a genetic component to the causes of adult acne simply because some people just don’t get it at all no matter how stressed they are, and others, like me, get massive outbreaks whenever we’re mildly stressed.  Whatever the causes of adult acne may be, there must be a cure for it. A Chinese friend of mine who never has any acne claim that acne is cause by an imbalance in our system. Maybe she is right after all.