What is Causing Your Blackheads and What You Can Do to Treat Them

Tired of blackheads interfering with your goals of achieving a clear and even complexion?

If finally eradicating your blackheads feels like an impossibility, you’ve come to the right place. Read on as Celestolite explains what’s causing your blackheads, along with how to rid your appearance of those pesky dark bumps.

What Are Blackheads and Why Do They Form?

Blackheads are a type of acne that most commonly affects the face. With that said, they can appear on the body too, mainly the arms, shoulders, back, chest, and neck.

Blackheads are caused when hair follicles end up clogged. In each follicle lies a single hair and a sebaceous gland, which produces the oil that keeps your skin conditioned. When excess oil and dead skin cells gather in the opening of a hair follicle, a bump is formed. If the skin over that bump remains closed, it’s a whitehead. However, if the skin opens up, the clog is exposed to air, turning it black and resulting in a blackhead.

Although blackheads aren’t painful in the way that pimples are, they can still be a nuisance! The good news is that the appearance of blackheads can usually be cleared with over-the-counter solutions:

Cleanse Your Skin Twice a Day

When sebum is produced in your hair follicles, it’s released onto the surface of the skin. Once there, it acts as a lubricant and a moisturizer. Your sebum plays an important role when it comes to how your skin cells function, but the problems begin when your skin starts to produce too much sebum. 

This can occur for a number of reasons. Genetics, hormonal fluctuations, stress, and more cause the skin to ramp up how much sebum it produces. As a result, there’s then too much sebum to be released onto the surface of the skin, meaning that the extra sebum remains in the hair follicles and contributes to clogs.

Keeping the surface of your skin clean will help to prevent this, which is why twice-daily cleansing is essential. While many choose to use cleansers designed specifically for acne-prone skin, this isn’t always necessary. Instead, sometimes, a gentle cleanser can be best. So long as you pick a formula that isn’t going to clog your pores, such as the Celestolite Estrella Cleanser Mousse, you’ll be able to clear away excess sebum without leaving your skin feeling irritated or over-dry.

Exfoliate Those Blackheads Away

Exfoliation is one of the go-to methods for minimizing the appearance of blackheads. The purpose of exfoliation is to remove the dead skin cells that are cluttering up the skin’s surface and pore openings. With those dead skin cells being one of the main reasons behind the formation of blackheads, regularly ridding your skin of them will go a long in keeping your complexion clear and blackhead-free.

Most people with acne-prone skin choose to exfoliate chemically. This is down to how physical exfoliators can sometimes make inflammation worse. However, things are a little different when dealing with blackheads. They’re not caused by inflammation, which is why they aren’t painful. 

As a result, physical exfoliators can work well too – they’re often more effective than their chemical counterparts when tackling the appearance of blackheads. The key is to ensure that you don’t choose an overly abrasive product. Look for one that exfoliates with small granules that aren’t going to tear your skin, just like the Celestolite Estrella Facial Peel. With this exfoliator containing a sprinkling of meteorite powder too, your skin will be positively glowing once you’re done using this product!

Add Salicylic Acid to Your Skincare Routine

If you’ve been doing some research into how to get rid of your blackheads, salicylic acid is an ingredient that you’ve likely come across several times now. It’s one of the most commonly recommended ingredients for people struggling with blackheads, purely because it’s so effective.

What is it? Salicylic acid is a beta-hydroxy acid. This means that it has an exfoliating effect on the skin. However, unlike alpha-hydroxy acids, salicylic acid is oil-soluble. This means that it’s able to work its way through the oil that coats your skin, enabling it to dive deeper into your pores to remove the more stubborn clogs that other products aren’t able to reach.

While many choose to go with cleansers or exfoliators containing the ingredient, salicylic acid can be beneficial when used in other products too. The Celestolite Luna Mineral Cream, for example, contains the ingredient. It’s a fantastic cream for moisturizing skin that’s prone to blackheads because the salicylic acid prevents it from clogging hair follicles while also helping to pull out any existing blockages you may have. Even better, this cream also contains vitamin A, an antioxidant that’s highly recommended to anyone struggling with any type of acne.

Use a Clay Mask Once a Week

Exfoliation shouldn’t be done more than two or three times a week. Over-exfoliating will damage your skin barrier and dehydrate your skin. This could have the devastating consequences of stimulating your skin into producing even more sebum. As a result, you could end up with even more blackheads!

What do you do if your skin could do with an extra exfoliation session? That’s where clay masks come in. Although clay isn’t technically an exfoliant, it’s revered for how it draws excess sebum away from the skin and the hair follicles. It’s a great way to reap the benefits of exfoliation without actually exfoliating!

With that said, make sure that you pick a clay mask that isn’t going to clog your pores. Many contain heavy oils, so choose one that doesn’t, such as the Celestolite Luna Lava Mask. Not only is this mask full of lightweight hydrating compounds and several antioxidants, but its self-heating effect offers up even more advantages. The heat that it produces leaves the pores feeling relaxed and more elastic. This allows the clay to draw out even more oil.

Keep Your Skin Hydrated

It’s so easy for the skin to become dehydrated, causing a number of issues to arise. One of these is an increase in blackheads.

How does dehydration correlate with the appearance of blackheads? Well, when your skin is dehydrated, the pores almost deflate. They also lack lubrication. As a result, the sebum that’s released from your sebaceous glands struggles to make its way to your skin’s surface. Instead, it’s much more likely to end up getting caught in your dead skin cells and creating a blockage from which a blackhead will form. This is why the simple act of keeping your skin hydrated can go a long way in preventing and reducing the appearance of blackheads. 

Your first go-to should be to make sure that you’re drinking plenty of water. This will keep your skin hydrated from within. 

However, that’s not enough to keep the surface of your skin hydrated, which is why a hydrating serum is also essential for your skincare routine. For this, we would recommend the Celestolite Cosmic Firming Serum. It’s packed with hydrating compounds, including sodium hyaluronate, glycerin, and lactic acid. The latter also has a mild exfoliating effect, which will help to keep your pores feeling clear and clog-free. You’ll find vitamins A and C in this formula too, both of which are excellent when trying to tackle the appearance of blackheads.

Remove Benzoyl Peroxide From Your Skincare Routine

One of the ingredients that’s commonly recommended to people with acne-prone skin is benzoyl peroxide. It’s an ingredient that works by reducing swelling and inflammation. This is why it’s so effective at treating cysts and pustules, both of which are common with inflammatory acne. Benzoyl peroxide also helps to get rid of acne-causing bacteria, once again keeping inflammatory acne at bay.

However, as we mentioned earlier, blackheads are a little different. They’re not caused by inflammation or bacteria. So, if you’ve been using benzoyl peroxide and it hasn’t been working on your blackheads, this is why! In fact, using the ingredient when your skin doesn’t need it could end up harming your skin, leading to dryness, free radical damage, and more.

If benzoyl peroxide is in your skincare routine as a method to battle blackheads, it’s time to remove it. Instead, some of the other ingredients that we’ve already discussed, such as salicylic acid, would be a much better alternative.

Consider Professional Treatments

One way to immediately remove a blackhead is with an extraction. This involves manually removing each black plug from the pores. The instant results that this provides are impressive, so much so that many people attempt to perform at-home extractions. The fact that there are now so many home extraction tools available makes this even more tempting. 

However, don’t be too hasty when it comes to taking matters into your own hands. Home extractions can go wrong so easily, leaving you with everything from hyperpigmentation and scarring to bruising and inflammation.

If you’re interested in an extraction, the best way forward would be to speak to a dermatologist. They’ll be able to perform an extraction safely and quickly, saving you from the downsides that this procedure can cause.

While you’re there, your dermatologist will also be able to recommend other professional treatments that could help with your blackheads. Microdermabrasion, for example, sands away the top layer of the skin, taking blackheads with it. Chemical peels work well too. Again, these remove the top layer of skin, along with any blackheads that are lingering there.

For blackhead prevention, laser and light therapies tend to be very successful. They dive deep into the skin and decrease how much sebum the skin produces. This then means that there’s less sebum around to clog up pores, saving you from the associated blackheads.

Summary

Blackheads can be tricky to deal with, especially since they often don’t respond to the products that are designed to treat inflammatory acne. Instead, they require a different level of care, as detailed above. Keep our tips in mind when it comes to treating and preventing the appearance of blackheads and you’ll soon be sporting a much clearer and brighter complexion, with blackheads becoming a problem of the past!

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