It will come as no surprise to learn that I’ve always loved beauty products. As soon as I hit secondary school I’d spend my pocket money on magazines—Bliss, J-17, CosmoGirl, I’d buy them all—because I was totally obsessed with the beauty pages inside, especially the skincare tips. You see, when you’re dealing with acne as a teenager you become somewhat preoccupied with your complexion, and I was a teen on an acne-busting mission. Of course, being the early noughties, there wasn’t the plethora of online information that there is now so I relied on magazines to educate me on which products would rid my skin of spots—and that meant a heck of a lot of Clearasil. Despite a lot of promising marketing jargon, nothing really worked. As a teenager your hormones are going haywire and, for me, acne is something that has stuck around into adulthood. In my late teens I caved and asked my GP to put me on a brand of contraceptive pill that I’d heard could help to clear your skin up but it still didn’t have the miraculous results that I craved, merely keeping my blemishes to a manageable minimum. And by then I had already been left with scarring and pigmentation due to some pretty intense breakouts in my younger years.
All this to say, if you have acne and are reading this piece then I totally get it. There is a kind of fervour that comes with facing daily breakouts that can feel exhausting: constantly researching, seeking advice and spending money on new products that you hope will finally be the ones to make a difference to your skin. But it doesn’t have to be that way. With over 150,000 posts on Instagram, the #skinpositivity hashtag is a celebration of skin in all its forms with people like Jenny Yu and Cydney showing that acne doesn’t have to be covered up. As someone whose confidence has always been intrinsically linked to the state of my skin, the discovery has felt like a breath of fresh air.
So, while I can’t promise that this skincare routine will rid your skin of acne entirely or transform your complexion overnight—and neither am I telling you that it should if you’re more than happy with your skin as it is—I can promise you that it’s more than just jargon. In fact, the entire routine is advised and approved by a woman who really knows her stuff, Dr Anita Sturnham MD—a GP specialising in skin health.
