Imagine yourself before going to an extremely important social gathering. You're young, you feel good about yourself, and you have a thriving social life with brightest and up and coming social circles in your area. Looking at yourself in the mirror, you spot something. Unsightly spots and bumps on your cheeks, on your forehead and on the T-section of your face. You lean closer to the mirror and ask yourself, "where in the world did these come from?"

Actually, even medical science has no clear answers to the question of where acne comes from. Yes, those marks on your face, unsightly as they are, are called acne. In medical parlance, the condition that afflicts your skin is called acne vulgaris. It doesn't mean that it's vulgar or anything, it just means that the condition is generalized and very visible to the outside world.

You Are Not Alone

In the United States alone, it is estimated that about 80 percent of teenagers, in the age range of 13-17 suffer from very mild to severe cases of acne. And this is not limited to this age range, nor is the acne limited to the face, where it is most dreaded. Some people suffer from what may call body acne, where the acne appears on the neck, on the upper chest area and on the back.

Body acne is often less severe, and since most of the time it is hidden, people generally don't pay much attention to it, unless of course the acne become irritated and start to itch. Adolescence marks the troublesome period when acne begins to appear in the poor faces of innocent teenagers and teenagers to-be. In fact, acne has been marked as one of the inevitable "growing pains".

Unfortunately, sometimes this particular growing pain does not go away. In the most unfortunate situations, the acne persists well into adulthood, when the skin is less robust. Youth seems to be the best time to be afflicted with acne because the skin is relatively young, and you have enough time to recover from scarring if the scars do appear.

But for adults? It's a completely different thing. Acne in adults is more visible, and are prone to oozing on a daily basis. The lesions are darker and more prominent, and when they get infected, the scarring is deep and dark as well.

How Does It Happen?

Acne mainly is the result of overproduction of the oil glands on the skin. You see, our pores have many glands operating at any single gland. The largest glands - the sebaceous glands - sometimes overproduce the natural oils that help maintain our skin's moisture. When this happens, particulates and dirt often clog the glands the larger pores, leading to infection.

The clogging itself is not really harmful. What causes the inflammation, and therefore, the unsightly lesions are the anaerobic bacteria that live in the lesions. This is the reason why most treatment for acne involves either the introduction of oxygen into the skin, or the introduction of a potent antibiotic on the afflicted regions of the body. Some of these medications are over the counter; but as we have already predicted, not all of them work efficiently.