How To Treat Acne Scars

Acne scars will generally reflect the severity of your acne. More severe acne will mean more severe scars. Acne can often disappear only to leave a discoloured or raised mark where it once was, or even small craters in severe cases. This redness often fades in a matter of months or in a year but in some cases these acne scars can be permanent. Luckily, you can take steps to reduce this scarring or even make it disappear.

The Benefits Of Sunscreen

You will probably know that wearing sunscreen protects your skin from sun damage, but it does more than that. Exposure to the sun’s harmful rays not only causes further damage to your skin but can prevent previous damage such as acne scars form healing. Scars will take longer to heal with sun exposure, or they may not heal at all.

Wearing sunscreen helps to allow the skin to complete its own natural healing process. You may not have known it, but by skipping the sunscreen and staying out in the sun for hours you have been keeping those scars where they are.

Surgical Options

If your acne scars are serious enough then they can be surgically removed. This may seem counterintuitive because everyone knows that you get scars from surgery. Wouldn’t this be a case of trading one scar in for another? Actually, it can improve your skin’s appearance. A doctor can remove the acne scar and then suture the skin around it together. This can serve to dramatically reduce the appearance of acne scarring or can remove these acne scars completely.

It is, of course, not the first option I would choose and it certainly isn’t the cheapest. But for some it may be the best option, or at least the fastest.

Laser Treatments

The process known as laser resurfacing is another answer to more serious acne scarring, and works much in the same way as microdermabrasion. In this case, lasers are used to remove the top few layers of the skin. Then the skin simply heals as normal, and the scar is totally removed. Of course, the laser process will have to remove enough skin to remove the scars so the depth of skin removed will depend wholly on the severity and depth of the acne scars.

The complete removal of scars sounds wonderful and indeed it is, but this process can be painful. You are, after all, burning off layers of skin on your face. Extreme care will have to be taken after the surgery because the skin will be more vulnerable to damage without the protective top layers of the skin.

Obviously, you will have to avoid the sun during your recuperation, and you may want to avoid public settings in general until your face has had a chance to heal. On the plus side, as long as you do not experience more acne that causes more scars your scars will be gone forever, but it would certainly be best to wait until your acne clears up before using this method of scar removal.

Treating acne scars can be as simple as letting your skin heal itself or can be complicated enough to require surgical procedures or laser treatments. The positive note in all this is that acne scars can be treated. At the very least, they can be improved and you may even be able to remove them entirely.