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This Is Why Your Skin Is All Over the Place Right Now

Raise your hand if you’re breaking out!
Why your skin may be dealing with acne and irritation right now.
Studio Firma/Adobe Stock

Now that most of us are spending extra time at home thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve started to tune in to our skin in a way we didn’t necessarily have time for previously—and some of us aren’t too pleased with what we’re seeing.

For some, this time at home has finally allowed us to scale back on all those products, revealing clear skin with—surprise!—a minimalist routine. But others are finding themselves battling breakout after breakout, Carol Cheng, M.D., assistant clinical professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and director of the Acne Procedure Clinic at UCLA Medical Center, Santa Monica, tells SELF. “I’ve seen it go both ways,” she says, “and I can see a number of reasons why.”

Whether your skin is getting better these days or…not, here’s what might be behind those changes.

There are tons of factors that could be affecting your skin right now—for better or worse.

It’s important to remember that some acne triggers aren’t going to change right now, Dr. Cheng says, such as the hormonal influence on skin and acne. But here are a few things that might be making a difference on your skin.

Stress, sleep, diet. People’s skin may respond to things like changes in stress, diet, and sleep in different ways, and we don’t totally understand why, Dr. Cheng says. But if you notice that your skin is behaving badly right now, it makes sense that it might have something to do with these other big changes in your environment and behavior right now.

Using fewer skin-care products. “Part of what’s helping people is they are cleaning up their routine,” Mary L. Stevenson, M.D., assistant professor in the Ronald O. Perelman Department of Dermatology at NYU Langone Health, tells SELF. Not having to go into an office every day is giving us the freedom to cut back on our skin-care regimens and really take the time to be thoughtful about what we’re putting on our face—perhaps we’re even doing it over the course of a morning rather than in 30 seconds before rushing out the door!

For some, that minimalism might make them realize they didn’t actually need all those products and that some of them might have even been making their skin break out or irritated. But some of us really do rely on those products to keep our skin calm and clear, Dr. Stevenson says, so taking a break could have a detrimental effect on our skin.

Working out at home. If you, like many of us, have gone from working out at your favorite gym or studio class to exclusively working out at home, that could also be having an effect on your skin, Dr. Stevenson says. At home you have time to take off your makeup, you’re not working out in the same room as 25 other sweaty people, and you can clean off all that sweat immediately after you’re done rather than waiting a full subway ride to shower at home. Having that much newfound control over your fitness environment could lead to overall less irritated and less acne-prone skin.

Wearing less makeup. As with skin care, a lot of us are finding that there’s less of a need to wear makeup daily because we’re leaving home so much less often. Personally, outside of the occasional Zoom call, I basically don’t wear any makeup these days, and my skin has been pretty into it. That could be because the products I was wearing are irritating, or it could just be the simple fact of not having an extra layer of stuff on top of my skin helps prevent acne. “The most irritating thing we do is too much,” Dr. Stevenson says.

Sitting in front of screens constantly. Yes, if you are prone to hyperpigmentation, the blue light from your devices might exacerbate that, SELF explained previously. But the bigger risk of sitting idly in front of your laptop, phone, tablet, et cetera for hours on end is that you’re more likely to absent-mindedly pick at or touch your face, Dr. Cheng says, which can contribute to acne and interfere with the skin’s normal healing process.

Wearing face masks. If you’ve been wearing a face mask when in public (which, yes, you should be), you’ve probably noticed how quickly it can get hot and sweaty under there. You may have also noticed that you’re getting acne in the areas of your face that are under the mask. That could be thanks to acne mechanica, Dr. Cheng says, which is caused by something physically trapping that warmth and sweat on your skin.

Take this opportunity to work on your relationship with your skin.

One of the few, tiny silver linings of having this time at home is being able to take the opportunity to more closely monitor your skin and how your products affect it, Dr. Stevenson says. But it’s also important to recognize when you’re paying too much attention to your skin, which can be especially difficult right now if you deal with OCD or a body-focused repetitive disorder that involves skin picking.

In general, Dr. Stevenson recommends checking in on your skin at three points during the day: when you wake up, when you get home from work, and before you go to bed. Right now, obviously, many of us don’t get home from work, we just are home and also working. So the blurring of that line can be a little difficult to navigate. It might require you to pick a time when your work day is usually over. Still, try to take those moments—and only those moments—throughout the day to tune in to your skin. And, as SELF explained previously, setting time limits like this is one crucial strategy to managing skin-fueled OCD symptoms.

Ultimately, it’s completely understandable that, with so many changes in our lives, our skin might be going through some changes too. And, for most of us, the changes will be relatively minor and easy to manage with our usual acne- and irritation-fighting strategies. But if your skin changes are causing extra stress or you don’t know what’s causing those changes, it’s worth checking in with a dermatologist about what you can do to deal with them.

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