Fellow men.
Fellow confused and searching men.
This is my first post of what I hope to turn into the top site for us men who are dealing with acne.
Firstly, just say it.
“My name is Chris, and I have acne.”
Replace my name with Larry, Wilfred, Ahmed, whatever your name is and just see how it feels to say it. Personally, despite suffering with acne for just over ten years, I had never uttered these words aloud until last month when I was confident I had finally found the solution to my own acne. I have still never said it to another human being.
And that’s the thing isn’t it. The stigma around acne is overwhelming. Better to just try and ignore it, hope it goes away by itself, delude yourself on the good days that it’s on the way out. On the bad days, if you’re like me you will be frantically thinking of everything you’ve done/eaten/drunk for the last day/two days/week/month/year in the hope of discovering a potential “trigger” for this latest breakout; the one lightbulb revelation which, once you avoid/do more of it, will finally cure you.
Well I’ve been there, done that and finally emerged on the other side, a grown up man. The whole point of this site is to share my nearly 11 years of experience as a man with acne. I’ll get on to telling you my own cure in another post but that’s not nearly as important as telling you all the things I’ve tried and researched to get here. Because you have no way of knowing, without trying everything you can, what really causes your acne.
Unless of course you think going to a doctor or dermatologist is going to help. I suspect if you’re reading this you’ve either done that and been frustrated at the junk they dress up as “treatment” or like me, you can’t imagine anything worse as a man than going to someone else and whining about your problems. Every other site out there will probably tell you different but I, for one, applaud that attitude in another man.
You got a problem, you want to sort it out yourself. A man can’t rely on anyone else to care about his problems in this life, just himself.
Now, to clear something up (excuse me, but I will be making puns throughout, it’s exceptionally clever humour); I’m 28 and here’s the thing – I don’t count male adult acne as really starting until at least age 18. Because if you’re under 18 your hormones are all over the place anyway and no-one, honestly, gives a second thought to a teen with pimples. Nothing will really help at that age.
However, once you’re over and done with growing up (like any of us are ever done with growing up) you want to be the alpha male you know you can be and acne, well, it just feels like it’s holding you back, restraining you from living like the King Among Men you know you are. Stopping your naturally boy-to-man transition and leaving you feeling, well, too young for your age.
Remember, in the 40s manhood started at 16 when you got given a gun and sent to fight for freedom. Inspirational stuff. You killed, you came home and by the time you were 21 you’d been married for three years. No spots on that. (More on why I think acne was cleared earlier for boys in those days in another post).
We all know the manly things you want to do. Drink, pick up girls, be impressive at work, make a ton of money, save the environment, get married, have kids, drink and pick up girls again because being married with kids and a ton of money ain’t enough to satisfy a real man.
So you might not do those things anyway, but it you want to know that you could if you wanted to. And no-one who has ever done these things has acne. That’s not to say if you have acne you have no self-worth, or you should stop trying – it’s just that if I offered you a million dollars to come up with three top male role models who have acne, let’s face it. You’re staying poor.
For me it’s a mixture of James Bond and Don Draper. Every good and awful quality you need in a man. No man should ever be completely virtuous in my opinion. That’s not alpha, you’re missing out. Also despite being born in the mid to late 80’s, the period from 1930-1969 seems like the coolest time of the last few millennia of human existence. Men were men in those days.
I’d like to finish with the reason for doing this. It’s because despite acne being confusing as hell and affecting around 8-17% of the adult male population depending on who’s talking, there aren’t really any good sites directed totally at men.
Loads for women (probably because more adult women have acne than adult men – around double). With seemingly endless lines of fragrant products to scarify and pamper your face with, all-natural regimes making use of honey and jojoba oil (the hell’s that anyway?), talk of “that time of the month” and so on. Well, damn it, that just doesn’t apply to men. The science of being a man is so totally different to that of a woman, and our skin is different as well.
Literally nothing you read on a site that isn’t specifically aimed at men is going to help you, and even those that are will most likely be written by people advertising products. You think they give a damn if their product helps? It’s their job to simply sell you more of the same, so how long would they be in business if it did?! Most of it is so-called “common knowledge” anyway, that you need to wash (with a product), cleanse (with a product), exfoliate (with a product), shave (with a specially-formulated product, containing hydro-super-gel-balls)…
See where this is going?
Well, I just can’t imagine how men survived before this array of pampering madness. Oh wait, I remember – by being men and damn well not using them.
Wake up, fellow soon-to-be alpha men!
Trust me on this, conventional acne advice for almost everyone is way off. For men, it’s further off.
So in the continuing future, I’ll be sharing advice, tips, regimes, products, science (bitch!) all specifically for men from my own ten years of research and experimentation on myself. You pick your favourite, give it a month or two, then if you’re still not clear you pick another. Or pick something that sounds “right” for you. You’d be surprised how much your natural male intuition plays a part in curing you of acne.
Stay tuned, signing off.
