Why You Should Never Pop Your Pimples
I have a confession to make. I love popping my pimples. I mean I really love it. The sense of relief and released pressure of popping a pimple just feels so good, that it's hard for me to resist and has taken me years to break the habit.
But I had to break the habit, because no matter how satisfying it is, popping pimples is simply awful for your skin. You could be doing a lot more harm than good by picking at your face, so even though it might be hard to resist, there are a lot of reasons why you need to break the habit. Here are just a few:
1. You're keeping your blemishes from healing
Believe it or not, the inflammation around your blemish is the body's way of trying to heal itself. Your body is pretty resilient, and is great at healing itself, too.
Blemishes are actually the body's natural response to dirt, bacteria, and sebum clogging a pore, and your skin's way of trying to push the clogging agents out of the skin, and inflammation (red, swollen, and warm areas around the pimple) is the body's reaction to infection. It heats up around the blemish to kill the bacteria and keep it from spreading. It's just like when you have a fever: your body is raising its temperature to kill an infection.
When you pop your pimples, you are interfering with the body's natural healing process, and actually making it more difficult for it to do its job.
If you leave the zits alone and don't squeeze them, they'll clear up in about a week or pop on their own.
What do we recommend you do?
Use our Exfoliant 3-4 times a week as a 10-minute treatment to help clear away dead, dry skin cells that can clog your pores. Keeping your pores from getting clogged is one step on the journey to clear, radiant skin.
Also, try out our SOS Target Solution when a pesky pimple pops up! Active ingredients like Ictasol and Sepicontrol a5 help to control the state of acne-prone skin, as well as fight inflammation without drying out the skin.
2. You tear the skin
When you pop a pimple, you end up tearing the skin in order to push the contents of the blemish out. What was originally just a blemish then turns into an open wound on your skin.
This ties in with our above point, that you're actually making it more difficult for the body to heal on its own. Now instead of a blemish, your body has to heal an open wound, which takes longer (and is also more unsightly).
3. You can make it worse
I know that the thinking behind popping a zit is to get rid of it for good, but the bad news is that the reality is the exact opposite.
First of all, when you touch the blemish to pop it, you're introducing even more dirt, oil, and bacteria from your hands onto both the pimple and your face. If you're unsuccessful when popping your zit, it's likely that it will only get bigger because of this extra oil, dirt, and bacteria (and you're also more likely to introduce these substances into clean pores on your face, creating more blemishes).
The bottom line is, try to keep your hands off your face.
Secondly, when you squeeze a pimple, you could be pushing pus down further into your skin, which will either make it even bigger, or will cause that pus to come back up again later if you already squeezed some out. No one likes a recurring pimple!
4. You can spread the infection
Have you ever noticed that sometimes when you pop a zit, a bunch more pop back up around it later on? This is because a) touching your face is not good (see above), and b) the pus that comes out of your pimple can infect clean pores and spread the infection.
No one wants that!
5. You can scar
I know from experience that popping pimples can scar your skin, so please don't be like me on this front! Scarring can occur when improperly trying to extract pus from a pimple, when you try to squeeze a cystic pimple, or simply from creating an open wound where there wasn't one before.
We want your skin to stay as fresh and lovely as it is now, so take our word for it, and don't pop your pimples!
Have you successfully stopped popping pimples? Share your success story with us!
