Men's Skin Care - Treating Acne

Pirooz Sarshar: Hi! I am Pirooz Sarshar, co-founder of the Grooming Lounge. Today I have been teaching you the basics to men's skincare. In this segment, I am going to teach you about acne. And as you can see since you saw me last, I have a big juicy zit, that I got last night, I guess and I woke up this morning and I saw it. Right here on the tip of my nose that when I least except it. Acne comes when you least expect it and how does it form, where is it come from?

Well, acne is basically access oil clogged pores and it comes from diet, and it comes from stress and it comes from hormones and sometimes as acne is hereditary. Now different types of acne are treated in different ways. Blackheads for instance which are darker and you see it with the open pores are best treated with the salicylic acid. So you need a product with salicylic acid.

Now the cleanser you would use to wash your face, If you have acne would be a cleanser that would contain salicylic acid. Okay, so even the cleanser you use when you have acne is a lot different than the normal cleanser you would use. Zits for instance like the one I have here, I wake up one morning in my hotel room and I am traveling are best treated with spot treatments and spot treatments usually contain salicylic acid like 2%, 1% or sometimes benzoyl peroxide and these ingredients help reduce the life span of the zit.

All over acne requires Retin-A and Retin-A actually prevents you from scaring because if you notice anybody who has got all over acne, sometimes has scars that come with that. If you do any of these or if you use any of these products and you find that nothing works, at that time you should see a dermatologist and in most cases, the dermatologist is going to recommend a over the counter treatment like Tetracycline in antibiotics.

Now, switching gears,I have to ask myself, should I stay or should I go? Do I pop it or do I not pop it? Well we always advise against not popping it because popping a zit improperly can cause scars and it can cause the zit to go in and spread more zits and in other words if I pop it the wrong way I am going to create more bacteria on the surrounding skin.

So what do I do, well I can take my concealer and concealers come in different forms and you can just basically take the pad here and you can cover up the nose area basically or the area where you have the zits so this way, the zit is not exposed and there is concealers that cover up that match your skin tone. The way you want to pop the zit, the way you want to go about it, is you want to make sure that the large white puss is just sticking out of the head. If the white puss isn't sticking out of the zit, you don't want to pop it. It's not ready to pop.

Now what's the proper way of popping a zit? I know this sounds gross, but this is really important because most people do this and they have no idea what to do. There is a way to pop zits. You can use tools just like these implements here, that are again very popular with men and these tools are used to squeeze the pimple or the zit out when it's ready. Okay, some folks actually use sterilized needle and they put it in alcohol and or they use a lighter to sterilize it. That's a little rough, so I would stick to these tools. But I am going to show you how to pop a zit the proper way.

Alright, the first thing you want to do is you want to wash your hands. You want to make sure your hands are clean just like so. So I will take a little bit of this cleanser, again, it's very concentrated so I only use that size, okay and with even pressure we are going to push the zit out perpendicularly and we are going to work around the zit, alright. And you have to be careful because if you squeeze it backwards and not outwards, it can cause more inflammation and it can turn the zit red.

So, once I have washed my hands, I grab two tissues just like this, I stand in front of the mirror, okay. I want to push the zit, not inwards when I am popping it, I want to push it outwards and pop it. So I am going to take the zit just like this and I am going to pop it and be careful, I haven't popped it yet but be careful, sometimes it tends to splash out and hit the mirror and you don't want that, but if it does you can just wipe it off. It won't hurt your mirror in anyway.

So I am going to take it just like this, I am going to pop it and you will notice, it's going to come right, right off just like that. Now once you have popped a zit, what you want to do is you want to take the tissues, just fold them throw them away. You want to make sure there is nothing on the mirror like we talk about earlier and at this time, what I would do is I would apply some alcohol or some sort of spot treatment with salicylic acid in that area.

The reason we do that is because we don't want the bacteria to spread. We just want to shut things down and keep things clean and firm. This could be done in different ways, I don't really like to use alcohols. So I would use an astringent toner like this are great for that because they are specially great for acne to begin with. If that doesn't suit you or if that doesn't work for you, what I recommend is using a spot treatment, a spot treatment like this one right here that contains 10% sulphur.

So, this is basically going to nuke your zit. Usually don't put this on after you pop the zit, but I don't think it's a bad idea because you don't want to let that zit get any further and you don't want it to come back in an hour, you don't want it to come back tomorrow morning, you don't want to come back at all. So just take a q-tip, dip it in here just like this and apply it on the area and then treating it right in that spot right there.

The other thing to remember when it comes to acne that, it's really important to understand what sort of cleanser you are going to use and if your skin is prone to acne and if you are getting acne and blackheads, it means that there is a lot of dirt, oil and bacteria, meaning A. You are either not washing your face properly, B. You could be stressed out, C. It could be diet. It could be all the factors that we discussed in the beginning.

So take a look in the mirror, whether you have blackheads and how do we know if you have blackheads? Well, usually they are open pores and blackheads seem to occur for all those of us who have a T-zone or combination skin. Oily and acne prone skin is usually a lot oilier and it contains a lot more acne, you will notice the acne on one sensitive skin it looks red, okay.

Blackheads, blackheads are the other form of acne, well they are usually ingrown hairs and yes, it is some form of acne and I would -- there are products out there to take remedy blackheads and those products usually contain aspirin, alcohol and they go in and they just basically dry it out. So that's it for today. I hope you learned a lot, what I wanted to do today and our goal was to go over some basic skincare for men. There is a lot more to learn when it comes to skincare. We just wanted to give you some basic basic skills and basic steps and basic tips and some common products that you can use to create a better skincare routine for yourself and to look better and feel younger and to look refreshing, thank you so much and we will see you the next time.