:Clear Skin Blog

Recently, I’ve been reading quite a bit about the relationship between your diet and your skin. The stance of the medical community has been pretty clear that acne is not caused by anything in your diet. However, with the emergence of vitamin B5 research and the Coenzyme-A theory, things may not be and cut-and-dry as they seem. I’ve stated before that, while your diet may not cause acne, it can certainly effect the intensity of acne that you experience.

An important aspect of the relationship between acne and your diet is something that directly relates to vitamin B5, that is, your body’s supply of Coenzyme-A.

Why is it that so many people experience breakouts when they eat certain foods? Acne is generally considered to be caused by hormonal shifts, but if we look a bit closer, but hormonal shifts and junk food have something very similar in common: they both demand high amounts of Coenzyme-A. Just as a surge in your hormones will require a large supply of Co-A in order to produce more of those sex hormones (thus sapping your body of the Co-A needed to metabolize skin oil), fatty and sugary foods also require a large amount of Co-A in order for your body to break them down.

When you eat foods high in sugar and saturated fat, you drain your body’s supply of B5, as it is rapidly used to produce the large amount of Co-A needed for the metabolism of these foods. Again, if you are not taking supplements (and sometimes even if you are), you may not be left with an ample enough supply of Co-A to efficiently metabolize the sebum in your skin — resulting in acne. In essence, a poor diet can have the same effect on your skin as hormonal shifts, and may in fact be a real cause of acne, and not just a distant contributor.

Vitamin B5 is the first step to dealing with this problem, as you need to supply your body with enough Co-A to handle these situations with room to spare. However, even if you are taking B5, it’s still a good idea to take a good look at your diet. Are you eating fast food on a daily basis? Do you aim for a balance, or throw whatever looks good into the microwave? Clear skin is a battle, and if you’re serious about it, you need to start eating a healthy diet today. That doesn’t mean cutting all your favorite foods out of the loop, but it does mean moderation, and making a concerted effort to more raw foods and less pre-packaged ones.

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Well, one temporary and one not-so-temporary change, actually. As I alluded to in the last post, we’ve gone ahead and disabled the 6-bottle bundle at Acne-Vitamins for the time being. Rest assured that we’ll definitely be making that deal available again once we get over these current shortages. The other change is that Acne-Vitamins will no longer be shipping our clear skin products worldwide. We’ve had very bad luck in getting our packages delivered in certain countries (such as the Philippines, most of Africa, and the Middle East). All of our international packages have always conformed to the formats of the Universal Postal Union, and we label our packages very clearly. However, the fact is that not every country’s postal system is reliable, some countries do not allow dietary supplements to be imported at all, and in some places any package from the US is liable to be stolen. We were spending so much on resending packages and refunding products that never arrived, that it just wasn’t worth the trouble anymore. We will still be shipping our acne products to North America, Australia, most of Europe, and select countries in Asia.

*Note that none of these changes will effect current purchases or shipping times. We’ll still be accepting normal orders and shipping them out just as fast as we always do.

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OK, the sales spike in the last month has made things a lot busier around here, and while this is a good problem to have, I may be making some temporary changes in order to curb the amount of Clear5 we’re selling at Acne-Vitamins. Don’t worry, I will not be raising the price or anything like that. What I may have to do is remove the 6-bottle discount bundle from our shopping cart for a while. That, I hope, will help our current inventory last long enough for us to restock.

Time-release vitamins take longer to manufacture than standard tablets or capsules, and so we have to keep our manufacturing time-line well ahead of customer orders. However, since we’re having new printing plates made for our upgraded labels, that means a slightly longer process than usual. This, combined with the unexpected surge of business in January, means I’m left stuck with a little inventory problem ^_^. I’m sure we’ll work everything out without any serious delays, but whatever happens I’ll be sure to keep everyone in the know - and not just on the blog.

In totally unrelated news, Nintendo just officially announced the release of a newly redesigned DS, called the DS Lite. I’ve got to say, I totally love the new look. It’s got a sleek iPod-inspired design, and is just more practical as a portable gaming system since it’s now smaller and lighter (both the original DS and the PSP are way to big to fit your pocket…unless you’re 7 feet tall or going for that Napoleon Dynamite look). Let’s hope they release it over here soon.

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Tea Tree Oil is another natural acne treatment that is gaining popularity among those looking for alternative clear skin solutions. Best used as a spot treatment, tea tree oil has strong anti-bacterial qualities that can kill the acne-causing bacteria beneath your skin. You could say that it’s a natural alternative benzoyl peroxide, both in use and effects.

Tea tree oil is extracted from the leaves of the Australian Melaleuca Alternafolia Tree, and has traditionally been used to treat all kinds of ailments, from soothing pain to eliminating cold sores. Since inflammation of the skin is often exacerbated by bacteria, applying tea tree oil can result in faster healing of for small wounds. It also serves as a helpful disinfectant that doesn’t sting like alcohol.

Used as an acne treatment, a small amount of tea tree oil applied directly to an acne lesion will usually kill the underlying bacteria, often eliminating even small cysts within just a day or two. Users should take care not to apply too much, as tea tree oil can easily dry out your skin. Some may benefit from diluting it with a small amount of water, although most users are fine with 100% tea tree oil - provided that it is applied very lightly, and only directly upon acne spots.

How does it compare to BP? Well, results tend to vary with the user, but most user comments indicate that tea tree oil is just as effective as benzoyl peroxide, and often less drying. Some individuals experience faster results with BP, while other see faster results with tea tress oil, but this is most likely due to the quantities of each treatment applied, as well as natural differences in skin type. Other than that, tea tree oil will not bleach your clothes and sheets like BP will, but it does have an unpleasant smell that is often likened to gasoline (obviously, this is more noticeable with larger applications).

While tea tree oil is not a long-term acne solution (as it does not prevent acne), it is a very potent spot treatment for most acne sufferers, and is also more affordable than many benzoyl peroxide products. If you’re looking for a quick fix to get rid of that one acne spot, this may be it.

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I managed to re-design our Clear5 labels from scratch this weekend, as needed due to losing the originals in a hard drive crash (the Photoshop templates, that is. At least I had a gif file to work with). A month later and I’m still having to do extra work due to my dell HD burning out on me. Oh well. The labels are the same as our current ones, only updated with the slight formula changes that will go into effect next month (adding chromium and selenium, etc.). The Clear Skin Blog also got an upgraded sidebar. I’ve added some easy navigation links to help surfers find their way around Acne Vitamins, as more people seem to be discovering this blog in the search engines.

Speaking of search engines, Acne-Vitamins has recently been ranking rather well, and has even gained a few spots in Google (which usually hates me ^_^). Our Google rankings are only noticeable for those search terms containing “acne” and “vitamins” directly in them, but in MSN and Yahoo we’ve now got high positions for related terms such as “clear skin” and “acne products”. I suspect my recent articles and this blog have a lot to do with the serp jumps, but since people are finding the site this way, it makes sense that I should try and make sure the site relates as well to those terms as possible (you know, so people actually find what they’re looking for…). For acne products, our main page is a given, but I will probably be updating our clear skin guides soon to help out more users, and I may add another category onto the blog for those posts directly related to acne help.

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Some folks have mentioned that vitamin B5 acne treatment can have a rather nice side effect, that of making your skin look younger. While I wouldn’t consider B5 to really be an anti-aging treatment, it can actually have a similar effect for many users. This comes from the tightening of your pores that usually follows oil reduction. When your pores tighten naturally (due to your glands being less swollen with oil, as opposed to depleting your system with alcohol), your skin will feel and look more firm, and fine lines become less visible. I’ve even noticed the effect on my own forehead, even though I’m still in my 20’s and not exactly worried about aging (to me it’s one of those inevitable things like life, death, and taxes). In any case, it’s certainly a nice side effect for adult acne sufferers, and far preferable to mainstream treatments (such as benzoyl peroxide) that can do just the opposite - dry out your skin and leaving you more susceptible to sun damage, that in turn speeds the aging of your skin.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that, as you grow older, your body becomes less efficient at processing vitamins. Besides just vitamin B5, it’s important to take those daily multivitamins. This really goes for everyone, but it’s that much more essential as you get up in the years. Staying healthy by ensuring you get enough vitamins and minerals each day can help prevent all kinds of disorders, and that daily multivitamin ensures you’re getting all those essential elements that your diet (if you’re like most of us) is almost definitely lacking.

edit: After a bit more reading, it turns out that vitamin B5 is actually quite a popular ingredient in anti-aging products, and Coenzyme-A (the byproduct of B5) is actually lauded for its “youth preserving” properties when taken as a concentrated supplement.

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Wow, sales at Acne Vitamins have really picked up during January, with a lot more people ordering the 6-bottle supplies than I had anticipated. December is usually slow for us, due to the cold weather (causing many people dry skin) and holiday gift crunch, and so an increase is normal as January starts and Spring gets closer. Still, the rate of growth has been pretty rapid in the last few weeks, depleting out inventory almost as fast as I can fill it. We’ve never had problems keeping our acne products in stock, and hopefully this will remain the case, but I’ve gone ahead and shut down our online advertising efforts (mainly Google Adwords) for the time being in order to cool off demand a bit.

Interestingly, this doesn’t seem to have much at all to do with our recent print ads for Acne-Vitamins.com. The regions where our print ads have been running have actually seen little increase in business, making me think that print advertising for this market may not be so helpful unless you have a retail presence. Of course, advertising in the right magazine always has a nice bonus in that, even if it doesn’t generate sales, you can throw up a graphic on your website that says “as seen in…” and show off the covers of the magazines you’ve advertised in. Personally, I think this can be a little misleading since some visitors may get the idea that your product was actually recommended by a publication, when all you really did was pay for advertising space. Be it good or bad, it’s a popular way for dot-coms to maximize the benefit of their advertising dollars. It’s also a good idea to be an informed customer though, and understand the tricky ways that marketers use ^_^.

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We updated the weekend orders at Acne Vitamins as “shipped” a day early yesterday, as the postal service had actually taken the day off in honor of Martin Luther King Day. All of our weekend packages (along with Monday’s) shipped out this morning instead, so they should be on their way to you now. Not too much else has been going on here, although I’ve been collecting more feedback from Clear5 users and researching about how we can improve the effectiveness of the product that extra notch. We’re continuing to stock All-in-1, and I have a new shipment coming in soon for those long-time customers that prefer the classic formula.

Also, we will be improving the quality of our labels pretty soon. I like the design of our current labels, but since they are digitally printed the quality is not quite perfect (particularly the color quality). The new ones will soon be plate printed and offer a retail-worthy look for our Clear5 acne treatment. We always get inquiries about local availability (which is nonexistent, since all our business is conducted online), and I might consider that direction in the future, although I wouldn’t expect Clear5 to be at your local Walmart any time too soon.

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Every now and then we get requests to offer free samples of our acne treatments, and unfortunately I always have to turn these down. There are a few reasons why we don’t offer free samples, but the big ones are:

Firstly, the costs are just too prohibitive. There is a reason you don’t see more time-release vitamins out there, and that is because it costs a lot more to produce time-released vitamin supplements than standard ones. In many situations it is literally twice as expensive. As such, our profit margin is not so huge as to justify the expense. Moreover, even if we could, there is the problem of shipping. Most customers do not view something as “free” when they have to pull out their credit card, and there is no way we could simply eat the shipping cost, considering that many of our international packages can cost as much as $10 in postage alone (before the cost of shipping materials).

Secondly, we recommend starting with the 2-bottle supply for a good reason. Especially if we tried to offer a smaller bottle as a free sample, it may not give users dramatic enough results for them to stick with the product. Experience has shown that customers who stick with Clear5 past the first bottle are much more likely to start seeing impressive acne reduction. Clear skin can happen very quickly for some, but the larger percent need at least a month of constant use, and a single “free sample” bottle from Acne Vitamins may simply not be enough to see the kind of results that they might have seen had they purchased more. We want our product to work. Free is nice, but effective is better.

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While vitamin C will most likely not be in future versions of our formula, we may add a few key minerals into the mix, namely a small amount of chromium and selenium.

These two essential trace minerals both play important roles in skin care - in fighting infections and strengthening your skin cells. While zinc remains the most important mineral for acne prevention, a healthy amount of chromium and selenium can also indirectly aid the fight. The fact that chromium is one of the most common vitamin deficiencies is also a good reason to include it just in case. However, as with any mineral, too much is never a good thing and can cause serious side effects. We will be formulating our levels of these ingredients to make sure that there is no danger of side effects at all. Moreover, we may be tweaking the ratios of some of our other ingredients to increase the effectiveness of vitamin B5. With Clear5 the need for a other B-vitamin supplements is a lessened, but a daily multivitamin is still a good idea.

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