Acne Spots and Traces

(article ©copyright, NEWSdial.com) If you thought that the difference between spots and other traces is that, compared to scars, they’re non-permanent, well, by now you should know better considering we were just discussing the non-permanent follicular muscular atrophy.

But it is part true, these non-scars are non-permanent, but they are just as visible.

Two types of such spots and traces are particularly common among people who have acne, and they are:

Post-Inflammatory Pigmentation
Exactly as the name suggests, sometimes after, or even at the later stages of an inflammation, the skin of the affected area undergoes discoloration, or in other words, pigmentation changes.

Normally, such a discoloration takes the form of the skin darkening in the affected area.

Prevalently, this affects those who already had darker skin to begin with, though it is not unheard of that it would affect those with white skin as well. Eventually, they appear to fade away, but in some cases can stick around for quite some time.

Macules
Regular macules (as opposed to the atrophic variety) are simply red or reddish-brown spots that tend to appear in inflamed regions. They are the ‘after-effect’ of an acne lesion, and are normally pretty flat.

Such spots can disappear completely, though it may take anything up to 6 or so months for them to do so.

Clearly, one solution to these common acne traces is to simply leave them be and hope that they disappear, and to be completely honest, they do in most cases.

However, sometimes they do need a little bit of a helping hand, and thankfully, the treatment for that mirrors the treatment for regular scars pretty closely. So, when we get to discussing those, we’ll learn a bit more.

For now though, we’re going to be first taking a look at what causes these scars to appear and ways to prevent acne scarring:

Acne Scarring and Prevention

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