When Good Skin Goes Bad (or: All About Exfoliants), Part I

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.
This is a detective story, but also a story about the decisions we make when we're broke. It's a long one, so I'll just jump right in. I've never had flawless skin - occasional breakout, etc. - but the last 6 weeks or so it seemed to be getting progressively worse. Not only worse acne, but rougher texture, bigger pores and lines - not a change I was pleased with. There's a photo below, hidden behind the jump for the squeamish. I mean, it's not nasty or anything, but it's also not pretty.

I felt like there had to be something behind this downturn, but these things are hard to figure out, especially when multiple factors had changed roughly the same period, i.e. late December-early January. What exactly was to blame for the mess? These are the possibilities I came up with:

• I'd been moisturizing a lot more, especially before bed. My skin was extra dry from the weather, combined with the horrible dry heat in my apartment. (I mentioned this frustrating change back in November.) Recently, my skin seems to have acclimatized and doesn't feel nearly as parched, so I've cut back on the moisturizing.
• I ran out of my BHA (beta hydroxy acid) exfoliant and didn't replace it, because I felt like it probably wasn't doing much of anything.
• I had been slowly and steadily adding more and more wheat to my diet, despite knowing that it fucks with my body. More on that later.
• I started using one of those battery-powered rotating face brush thingies. I started by using it 1-2 times a week, and then after a few weeks went up to about every second day when my skin kept getting worse.

I'm sure there are other things, but those changes seemed like the most worthwhile ones to consider. The best way to isolate the cause of a problem like this is, of course, to remove/change one suspect at a time and see if anything improves. That can be difficult if you're impatient, and especially if you don't make a connection immediately between skin problems and some kind of behavior. 

In this case, the first thing I decided to do was try some BHA again (mostly because it was simply the first thing that occurred to me). I'd thought that it hadn't been doing much for my skin, but I realized that maybe I was behaving like someone who stops taking their medication when they feel better, even though the medication is the thing that's actually making them feel better. (Or like people who abolish the VRA because it's effective.) I made the decision to try some BHA again at the end of January - and since it was the end of the month, funds were running low. At the same time, I was annoyed enough at my stupid fucking face that I wanted to do something about it immediately.

I had been using Paula's Choice CLEAR Extra Strength Acne Exfoliant. But that shit costs $23 a bottle, and I just didn't have it in my budget before payday. I started browsing Beautypedia to see if there was a decent, but cheaper, option available. I reasoned that if the Paula's Choice version had actually been working for me, then something else they recommended would be likely to work too. 

But holy shit, BHA exfoliants are not cheap, folks. Sure, there are lots of products out there with salicylic acid in them, which is what BHA is, but they're not all exfoliants. BHA has been shown not only to exfoliate the surface of the skin, but also the inside of pores, which is what makes it good for both anti-aging purposes and also acne. (AHA, on the other hand, only does the surface exfoliating, which means it's good if you are sensitive to BHA or have clear skin, but not what I personally needed.) Not every product with BHA will act as an exfoliant, however - it has to have the right pH. 

So I was pleased to find a $7 product that Beautypedia says will work as an exfoliant: Clean & Clear Advantage Oil Absorbing Treatment. You can read what they have to say about it here. Sweet, right? I didn't have to spend $23. If you actually break it down, though, the Clean & Clear option actually costs almost as much per unit as the Paula's Choice exfoliant. It's $7 for 1.5 oz. of the C&C stuff (i.e. $4.67 per oz.) and $23 for 4 oz. of the Paula's Choice product (i.e. $5.75 per oz.). There is a difference there, for sure, but it's not as huge as it seems when you initially consider the full price of each product. It's also important to consider that these two exfoliants are very different in terms of formulation. The C&C one is a cream, while the PC one is a clear liquid. I've found that to cover my entire face with the C&C product, I actually need to use significantly more than I would with the thinner PC liquid. The latter only requires a few drops on a cotton ball (maybe 4-5 drops max), which the C&C cream requires an amount between the size of a nickel and a quarter. (Since it's about the same thickness as shampoo or conditioner, just picture that when I describe it in terms of coins.)

Because of these differences, I think that in terms of actual cost per use, the two products are quite close. The Paula's Choice exfoliant might even come out as being the more economical of the two.

Despite that fact, I ultimately chose to buy the $7 tube instead of the $23 bottle. This is what people mean when they say that it is expensive to be poor. Not that I am claiming extreme poverty, but there are definitely months when I'm living paycheck to paycheck. Anyone who has been in that situation knows that you often have to choose something that has a lesser overall value, because it also represents a lesser immediate investment. These things end up being more expensive over time, but usually you can't do anything about that. I was going to get paid, so I could have waited, but I decided to go with the slightly cheaper immediate gratification and hope it would work as well as the more familiar, but more expensive, option.

Here are my results. First, take a look at my skin before: