When I was a teenager, I was known as the Acne King -- and not without reason! With a visage that had scores of both black heads and white heads, I was a walking, talking advertisement for acne medication. If the scorn of my peers (especially the girls) was one thing, the impossibility of removing the ugly acne I had was another thing altogether.

The general myths about acne didn’t help. My family members firmly believed that acne was a result of poor (or more specifically, junk) diet. While it was true that I enjoyed the frequent dose of junk food that the neighborhood fast food joints dished out, I wasn’t too sure that eating out was the cause of my acne. I mean, a number of my friends ate out with me, and what’s more, ate junk food even more frequently than I did. But they hardly had any acne. Something had to be wrong with the popular belief right?

Another associated myth was that chocolate causes acne. And since I love chocolate in any form or shape, I would have found giving it up, an impossibility. But having read up and followed news and medical reports on the subject, I discovered to my relief that chocolate consumption has nothing whatsoever to do with acne.

My peers were not much help either. Most of my friends, hinted that my acne advertisement face was a result of frequent masturbation. For a while, I believed this. Hey! What hot-blooded, teenage male doesn’t indulge in masturbation at that point in life? But then again, observation told me that this too was a myth. If acne was linked to masturbation, was I to conclude that my male friends who had no acne at all did not masturbate? I could have more easily believed that they were aliens! So, there went another acne myth.

Another myth that I did believe, and which sounded genuine and even scientific at that time, related to the assumption that acne is a result of dirt and dead skin accumulation on the face. I never stopped to consider that if that was the case, why wasn’t the skin on my arms and legs, which were more in contact with dirt and grime than any other part of my body, riddled with acne? In any case, I spent several days, weeks and months assiduously washing my face with all kinds of soaps and anti acne creams in a bid to eradicate acne, all to no effect. Finally, I just resorted to a fatalistic attitude and concluded that the more I stressed myself out thinking about acne, the more it would continue to be a problem. So at that point that I gave up worrying about it. And guess what? A couple of years later, as I slowly grew out of adolescence, the acne disappeared on its own! Although there are still a few tell tale scars of my acne king days, my face is now clear.