I was going to title this blog post How Birth Control Cleared My Acne, but then I realized I didn’t know how it cleared it- I just know it did. Today, I’m sharing my experience with birth control and my acne. In no way am I trying to persuade people to try anything in this blog post. This is solely me sharing my experience.
After my sophomore year of high school, I started to get really bad acne and I didn’t know why. I still don’t know why I started to break out. I used to just use Cetaphil face wash and a basic moisturizer, but once i started breaking out, I went HAM on skincare products. I mean changing up my face wash to acne prone face washes, using different moisturizers, using topical gels, and overall, just a significant amount of different products. At this point my skin hated me for it. I didn’t know what worked for me and I didn’t know what to do so I resorted to YouTube. I started watching videos of girls clearing their skin by taking birth control. I’m not kidding when I say I probably watched over 20 videos and I was convinced to try birth control for myself. As a junior in high school, I was scared to ask my mom to get on birth control, but I really really wanted to try it at that point. I was desperate. Thankfully she understood and let me tell the doctor that i wanted to try the pill.
My skin during my junior year of high school
The end of my junior year of high school, I really made it clear to my doctor that I wanted to get on BC to clear my acne. She was hesitant at first, but I insisted that the topical treatments weren’t working. My doctor was prescribing topical treatments like Clindamycin lotion and benzoyl peroxide cream/gel… There was a time where I even took my Mom’s Retin-A topical treatment because I wanted to get rid of my acne already (big mistake).
Once on birth control.
It didn’t take a short time, like most of the girls on Youtube, to clear my acne. A year passed and I still had pimples all over my face. I even had cystic acne that would clump together and would hurt so badly. My beginning stages of being on the pill was horrible, but I powered through it. My skin was going through a purge and I guess I had many pimples underneath my skin that needed to get out.
The picture to the left is my Freshman year in college. This is when my skin stopped purging and finally started to clear (keep in mind, started to clear), but it took until my sophomore year to finally have clear, acne free skin.
Even at this stage I almost gave up on the pill, but I took a step back and told myself that my skin is starting to clear which means I just have to stay committed and wait for my pimples to go away.
Still on the pill, but now with clear skin.
After 3 full years, My Skin is finally so much better.
(I started BC in 2015)
As you can see in the photo above, my skin has cleared up so much. At times when I wanted to give up on taking the pill, I stayed committed and powered through. I don’t have acne on my forehead or cheeks anymore and my skin complexion is way more even. Thanks to commitment and birth control, I’m confident to go out with no makeup! My skin has come a long way.
