If you’ve ever sat staring at a pimple wishing there was a magical cream that would erase it as fast as an Instagram filter and thought to yourself, “When I was a kid, wasn’t toothpaste a thing you could put on pimples to make them go away like immediately? I feel like it was a thing,” you’ve probably also gone the extra mile to Google it for yourself and found a lot of conflicting information, so let’s try to make sense of it together.
On one hand, toothpaste often contains drying, bacteria-fighting ingredients like hydrogen peroxide and alcohol, which is good because bacteria is definitely something you want to kill as part of your battle with the weird thing on your chin. On the other hand, Dr. Neal Schultz told The Huffington Post that although those are good ingredients, “there are no ingredients in toothpaste that make this method more effective than conventional treatments.”
While that’s vague as hell, if he’s saying that toothpaste isn’t any more effective than crappy acne products or great acne products, I wouldn’t bet the farm (I’m sorry for this phrase, I know this isn’t 1892) on this being your go-to solution.
Furthermore, a lot of sources say that putting toothpaste on your face can actually make your skin go insane, which is, you know, not ideal. Clearasil (biased? sure. in keeping with what a lot of other sources say? yes) says that while drying out a pimple seems like a good idea, drying out the skin in general is not a good idea. They also say that if you have sensitive skin, the ingredients in toothpaste might even “cause redness and burns on delicate skin.” BURNS, GUYS!!! BURNS!!! If there’s one thing that’s worse than having that temporary pimple, it’s having a VISIBLE BURN MARK in its place, or alongside it.
So now that you know all that, what the hell can you do right now this minute to handle it? It sucks, but from everything I’ve read and experienced, the best thing you can do is to leave that thing alone. Think about it, whenever you pop it or try to attack it, it just looks angrier and more wounded and gross and has the potential to just grow back even bigger and more confident and then you’re fighting a new battle. Plus, being stressed out raises your cortisol levels, which causes more oiliness, which leads to more breakouts. So just cover it up with concealer if it’s really bothering you.
If you wanna feel more proactive than that though, drink more water right now (always a good idea and hydrated skin is much happier), go exercise (bye, cortisol levels), and remember no one but you gives a shit about the pimple about your chin. I promise.
Original by Lane Moore
