:Clear Skin Blog

Since vitamin C is a popular ingredient in many clear skin treatments, and I also mention it’s helpful effects in our own acne vitamins guide, It may seem unusual that it is not on the list of ingredients included in Clear5. Someone recently asked about this, and so I might as well explain why C is not present in the new Clea5 formula and why it will probably stay that way.

Vitamin C is indeed a helpful vitamin for skin care, both due to its antioxidant properties and the fact that it plays an essential role in promoting tissue growth and repair. However, besides these roles, vitamin C is used in tons of different functions throughout the body. Because of its widespread use and the fact that your body uses it quickly, in order for vitamin C to actually make a difference, you really need to take a decent amount of it. While some of the B vitamins can help when used in amounts as a small as a single milligram, vitamin C should be taken in a much larger dose if you wish for it to bring noticeable benefits, whether your trying to stave off a cold or heal from acne scars. Even the average multivitamin has over 100mg of Vitamin C.

Like vitamin B5, vitamin C is water-soluble and very safe even at high doses, although doses above 5,000mg are generally unnecessary and not recommended. Also like B5, the range of dosages for treating problems such as stress or wound healing can very from person to person.

In any case, for vitamin C to be present to a helpful degree I would probably need to have at least 100mg of C present in our Clear5 tablets. The negative aspect to this is that the tablets would have to become larger, and this is something I would like to avoid. While many of our long-time customers are happy with the larger 1,000mg All-in-1 tablets, part of the benefit of Clear5 is having the tabs in a smaller, easy-to-swallow size. Moreover, this would still be a small dosage for vitamin C, and it’s unlikely that most users would actually benefit from it. While we have added some new ingredients into the mix with Clear5, vitamin B5 is still the most important element by far, and trying to stuff every vitamin into the pills would only end up watering down the formula.

As long as you’re taking a daily multivitamin, your vitamin C intake should be perfectly fine. For more information on Vitamin C, check out the WellFX database here.

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Bad acne can drive you to drink, but that’s probably not a good idea for improving your skin. While alcohol does not exactly cause acne, it can unfortunately contribute to breakouts, especially with people who already have an acne problem.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that when you’re drinking alcohol your skin can become rather flushed and red. For many drinkers, mild acne breakouts can often follow. This is due to the diuretic effect of alcohol, in that it basically saps water out of your cells, leaving your blood cells dilated - which causes the redness seen on your skin. This happens due to the fact that alcohol is a concentrated source of calories which metabolizes at a rapid pace. Your pores can shrivel a bit as this happens and get clogged, as they do not remain as supple as with a natural tightening of the skin as seen with B5. Also, the high sugar-yeast content of alcohol can contribute to bacteria growth, such as the P. acnes bacteria that results in acne.

What to do? Well, you can quit drinking….but since that doesn’t sound like fun, just keep in mind these effects and try to tone down the types of drinks that are most likely to cause flushing, mainly beer and red wine (being fermented and then further distilled makes these drinks more likely to cause flushing). A light beer that has a few less carbs will usually be easier on your skin, as well as domestic beers containing less preservatives. Hard liquor is actually better for you than a typical beer when it comes to skin care. In any case, just try not to overdo your drinking (ie: don’t be an alcoholic), and your skin will be better off in general (as will most things in your life ^_^).

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For many colleges, classes start up once again today. Today is also the start of my print ads in some college papers as well (at least here in Florida), so hopefully that goes well. I was a sophomore in college myself when I discovered B5 acne treatment after hearing about it at obscure message boards on the internet. I just wish I had found out about it sooner (although I would have missed out on the interesting comments from my roommates for having several drawers packed entirely full of skin care products).

While I graduated with a marketing degree back in 2003 (and got out of Ohio! - Sorry Ohioans, but Florida wins hands down), I actually ended up going back to college last year for a while, doing some pre-med classes just before taking Acne-Vitamins live. It was a strange feeling being back in school, and I’m glad I didn’t hesitate to launch the business right when the opportunity presented itself. One word of advice to all students and would-be entrepreneurs: take your chances now while you can. If you want to start a business, stop thinking about it and just do it. A lot of people plan for many years things which they never end up doing, and frankly, it’s a lot easy to take the financial risks involved with a start-up when you have no dependents and no (or less) debt to pay off ^_^. Even if everything fails (like my first e-business), you’ve got plenty of time ahead to worry about getting a “real job”. It will only get harder if you have to leave your comfort zone down the road when it means walking away from something you may not be able to gain back, such as an established position at a firm.

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Well, as I mentioned a few days back, order comments will now be handled by the usual means of email and the comment form at Acne-Vitamins, rather than having a separate field in the shopping cart checkout process. Besides lowering the amount of requests for illegal shipping favors, this also simply makes things run a bit smoother since we aren’t getting comments from a dozen different sources anymore, ensuring that the comments which we do get will be read and replied to in a timely manner.

Speaking of comments,, we just got some good feedback from a Clear5 user that highlights one of the benefits of Clear5 that we should probably mention more often: that it can be a big help with getting rid of back and body acne. For many of our customers, Spring Break is coming up soon, and it’s great to be able to wear a bathing suit and not have to be worried about annoying body acne. Remember to gently exfoliate as well for all you out there who are just starting on Clear5 - once your acne clears up initially, most users will find it’s usually quite easy to stay clear with just a maintenance dose of Clear5.

Our only other change to the Acne-Vitamins shopping cart was the removal of the reminder for our returning customers concerning the changes that happened with our server move. It’s been up since September, so hopefully everyone who had an older account has seen it by now.

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My latest article is on cystic acne treatment, and will probably look familiar to my cystic acne blog post from a few weeks back, although the article itself is a bit more detailed and (probably) helpful. In the article, the cause of cystic acne is explained (rapid overproduction of sebum resulting in the rupture of your gland), along with the best advice about how to treat it (and what not to do - specifically forcing cysts to the surface too early), and how to prevent it be means of controlling your oil production by means of zinc, B5 or (as a last resort) prescription treatments. You should be able to check it out at ezines and the other article sites soon, or you could just use the search box on my sidebar for the quick lowdown from my former post. It’s definitely good advice if you suffer from mild cystic acne outbreaks.

In totally random and unrelated news, I recently beat the PS2 game God of War, and man was it awesome! The game is rated M, and with good reason, as the violence is quite brutal (although it’s all against monsters and the like). Not recommended for small kids, but highly recommended for everyone else who likes intense action with spot-on play control. The visuals are easily the best I’ve ever seen the PS2 throw out (with the possible exception of RE4, although that game still looks better on the GC), and it has an amazing level of immersion for a game that mostly revolves around slashing down endless waves of zombies and minotaurs. The puzzles were actually very well done, and the game almost feels like one huge Zelda dungeon when all is said and done (any similarity to Zelda is generally a good thing). I can’t say the game was perfect (should have been more of a damage difference between quick and heavy attacks), but I had a blast overall and would have to say that this was one of the best games I’ve played on the PS2, ever.

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I’ve updated the acne testimony page once again with our latest batch of customer feedback (mostly from December). We managed to put up a few new sets of before-and-after pictures as well, showing some clear skin improvement. The middle set is a little harder to see due to (what I would guess is) a bright flash from the camera, but the bottom set is nice and obvious. I had deliberated about that one set due to the lower image quality, but hey I need some female pictures here! Hopefully more will be on the way this month.

In other news, I’m not sure if I should keep the “comments” box on the checkout page at the Acne-Vitamins shopping cart. Hardly anyone uses it, and when it is used, it’s often for requests such as obscuring our label or writing “gift” on a custom forms… Nice or not, I simply have no plans to do anything illegal when it comes to shipping, so these type of requests will just get ignored. No doubt some people would still email these requests separately, but honestly I prefer it that way, as at least there would be a few less strange requests, and it’s also much easier to reply to questions through email rather than cutting and pasting everything from OScommerce - which means faster service all around.

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Well, I fixed up a lot of little details today in the first stage of updating Acne-Vitamins. Our page now has that background shadow effect that I’ve been wanting to add, and in the process I also fixed up a centering problem that was effecting basically all of our non-blog pages. You won’t notice the new background effect unless you use a resolution higher than 1024 x 768, but even at 1024 there is a change thanks to the new fixes. Before, pages viewed at 1024 would show a horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of the browser window, even though the actual page fit on the screen without any need for scrolling. This was due the main table shifting a few pixels to the left. It turns out that the problem was due to the right-margin being undefined in our page properties. Now that everything is zeroed-out, the page should fit exactly in the 1024 x 768 viewing window without any problems - and for those that like higher resolutions (like me), the page background at Acne-Vitamins just looks better.

Prices are back to their normal levels today, and will probably stay that way for a while. We’ve lowered the regular price for a 2-bottle supply of Clear5 (or All-in-1) from $29.99 to $27.99, and the bulk discount for 6-bottle orders of Clear5 will stay in effect, so our products are still as affordable as ever. We sent out a whole bunch of last-minute sale orders today, and hopefully they will all arrive on time now (unlike all the delays we saw from the postal service during the holidays).

Next up on my list of things to do is updating the testimony page with our latest customer feedback. We’ve got some good stuff in December that you will be able to check out soon (I’ll probably have the new acne treatment testimony up in the next two days). We’ve only made the switch from All-in-1 to Clear5 just recently, so keep that feedback coming as I want to hear about everyone’s experience with the new formula!

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Happy New Year from Acne-Vitamins! I hope you can all look your best every day in 2006!

For reasons I don’t quite know, both USPS and UPS take the day off on January 2nd, so no orders will be shipping out today since there’s no one to ship them. We’ll be clearing out the (rather large) backlog of weekend orders tomorrow though. The holiday sale will officially end tomorrow as well, bringing us back to normal business prices.

I’m sure you’ve all got some ambitious resolutions. For Acne-Vitamins, we plan to improve both our product line and our marketing in 2006, and try to find a way for B5 to help a higher percent of those people who currently do not respond to it as well, possibly with the addition of stronger antioxidants. We’ve already got plans for some new print ads this month, so I’ll let you know how those go. It’s going to be a busy month, and things will probably heat up more as the weather does (and dry skin diminishes with the cold air). Of course, down here in Florida I’ve already got the air conditioner on again…

Hopefully 2006 will be a new year of clear skin for all our customers!

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