Direct vs indirect acne triggers: what you don't do is as important as what you do

Close-up of a woman's face showing her brown eye, reddish-brown hair, and part of her lips.

People often blame breakouts on certain foods like chocolate or greasy items, but these are not the true or sole triggers for acne. What you might neglect to do such as skipping essential skincare steps can cause breakouts just as much as any dietary choice. Achieving clear skin is similar to getting a six-pack: while eating junk food directly hinders your progress, failing to work out regularly also slows down your results significantly. In essence, both direct influences, like diet, and indirect factors, such as skincare habits, play important roles in the process of clearing your skin.

WHAT IS A DIRECT ACNE TRIGGER?

A direct acne trigger is a trigger that directly impacts the clearing process.  There are way more direct triggers than indirect triggers and we explain each of them in detail in our 8 Steps To Clear Skin e-course:

Pore clogging products

Products like shampoo, conditioner, and laundry detergent that contain comedogenic ingredients.

Lifestyle triggers

Things like sun exposure and acne mechanica.

Ingestible triggers

Including diet and medications.

WHAT IS AN INDIRECT ACNE TRIGGER?

An indirect acne trigger is something that can break you out because you are not doing it.  Indirect triggers tend to take longer to cause a breakout than direct triggers but not always:

Not using your acne clearing products

If you are using products that facilitate the clearing process and you skip a few sessions, acne seeds have a chance to form deep beneath the skin that can take months or years to show up on the surface for reasons I will explain below.  There are many reasons why people might not be using their acne clearing products but the most common reasons I see with my clients are that they travel and forget their products, they run out of their products, or they decide they want to start playing around with new products.

Not keeping up with acne treatments

If you stop or delay receiving treatments like ours that help clear out your follicles and accelerate the clearing process, this can also cause a slow backup of acne seeds that form inside of the skin.  This is also a trigger that may take months or years to build up so we have clients who don’t keep up with their maintenance treatments and then they come back a year later freaking out and wondering why they are broken out.  They usually start obsessing over potential direct triggers like diet too without realizing that they are breaking out from something they failed to do months or years ago.

DELAYED REACTION TIMES FOR DIRECT VS. INDIRECT TRIGGERS

As we also teach in our course, different trigger categories (ingestibles, lifestyle, products, etc) have different delayed reaction times.  So if you eat cheese, that typically takes longer to show up as a visible pimple on your face than stress would.  As I mentioned, indirect triggers tend to take longer to show up then direct triggers do.  So if your Doctor tells you to avoid your acne clearing skincare products while your skin heals after a laser procedure, it will take longer to break out from not those products than it would to break out if you use a pore-clogging liquid makeup.  Since indirect triggers have such a long delayed reaction time and people tend to attribute only direct triggers to breakouts, most of my clients won’t even connect the dots.  I had a client run out of one of her active products while she was traveling out of the country so she didn’t use her serum for 3 weeks.  She didn’t notice an increase in breakouts during those three weeks or immediately after so skipping her serum had actually planted seeds deep inside of her follicles.  When those seeds finally moved up towards the surface of the skin, she didn’t even think to attribute it to the serum she skipped months before and instead started obsessing about what she was eating instead.  So the next you have a breakout, don’t just ask yourself what you have been doing.  Ask yourself what you haven’t been doing that might have triggered you and think months back, not days back.