The Skinny on Skin Care: Clearing Up Seven Skin Care Myths

No matter how much time you spend at the gym or how well you stick to your new diet, you may still be neglecting an important component of your health: your skin. Even a yoga-practicing, vegetarian health nut (i.e. yours truly) can wake up every morning with dry skin on her hands and a new zit on her face. With so many myths surrounding skin care, you may not know how to start taking better care of yourself. Should you pop that unsightly pimple on your chin or just let it be? Should you put on sunscreen each time you go outside, even in the dead of winter? Her Campus consulted dermatologist Lauren Zeifman to put the rumors to rest.

To Pop, or Not to Pop?

Myth?: You should never pop a pimple.
This rumor is true, but many people don’t know why exactly they should leave their zits alone. (Maybe that’s why so many of us are guilty of squeezing our skin, anyway.) Zeifman warns against two possible consequences: “We all have bacteria under our nails, which can cause a secondary infection to our skin” if we try to pop a pimple, she says. Popping can also create trauma under the skin, resulting in a scar that may heal slower than the pimple itself. Most individual blemishes disappear on their own within a few days, but if you really can’t wait to be rid of yours, visit a dermatologist or skin care specialist, who can extract pimples or blackheads under sterile conditions.

Hands Off!

Myth?: Touching your face throughout the day will make your acne flare up. 
While hand-to-face contact isn’t known to cause acne, it can introduce new bacteria to the skin and make existing acne worse. “If you have an open wound on your face, such as a scratch, the bacteria from your hands can get transmitted to your skin and cause a secondary infection,” Zeifman says. So unless you’ve just washed them, keep your hands off. 

You Are What You Eat.

Myth?: Dairy products, greasy foods, chocolate and shellfish cause acne.
Research still hasn’t settled this issue. The American Academy of Dermatology maintains that so many factors contribute to acne – including heredity, hormones and stress levels – that our diet’s influence on our skin is hard to discern. And unless you keep a food diary, it’s hard to track what you ate and how it affected your skin. If you do happen to notice that a certain food causes your acne to flare up (the culprit in my case: too much yogurt), eat it in moderation or avoid it altogether.