So I had a baby and quit my job and we’re living on my husband’s salary now, so I have time to figure out ways to live on less money (but only while the baby naps).
My Proactiv regimen, which abolished my cystic acne four years ago, seems like a candidate. Looking at the bottles, it appears that the key ingredients are
Face wash: exfoliating grit and benzoyl peroxide 2.5%
Toner: witch hazel and glycolic acid
Lotion: benzoyl peroxide 2.5%
I might have time to identify what things we must be paying too much for, but I DON’T have time to read the darn ingredients labels of all 6000 acne products in the drug store. Has someone else given up Proactiv for an equally effective, more economical regimen? Can you tell me what products you use please?
Hmm…do you have health insurance? Can you go to a dermatologist and ask them?
The reason I suggest that instead of giving my answer for fighting cystic acne is that if you go to www.acne.org you will see that every single treatment works brilliantly for a bunch of people, doesn’t work for a bunch of other people and makes things worse for others.
So I would feel really bad if you got a ton of answers here and you were both overwhelmed by the different responses and then either tried something that didn’t work or tried something that was worse.
Actually I will share my answer for fighting cystic acne…I went to a dermatologist and she tried a bunch of different things for me over about 6 months until it got fixed. Now all I have to do is wash daily with Cetaphil and I’m good to go!
But it was a long 6 months before that was the case.
Pharmacists are a great resource for questions like this. Take the bottles to your local pharmacy and ask him or her the same question. If there is something available, prescription or otherwise, with similar ingredients, the pharmacist would know it.
Good luck. Maybe I’ll try proactiv for my son.
Witch hazel usually is in an irritating, drying alcohol base, and exfoliating scrubs can irritate and damage the skin as well. I second seeing a dermatologist if you can afford it. For exfoliation, products like salicylic acid (aka: BHA, beta-hydroxy acid) will both exfoliate and reduce inflammation - it’s essentially aspirin.
I have a good, inexpensive benzoyl peroxide product at home; I’ll post it after I get off the train. Check the product recommendations/reviews and skin care advice at beautypedia.com; the reviewers generally rely on a mix of testing, product analysis, and peer-reviewed journal articles (on the ingredients) to make recommendations.
The new Oxy Clinical, which is available in a kit with 3-4 weeks of stuff for $10-12, works just as well if not better than Proactiv for me. It might be cheaper in the long run to buy the bigger bottles of product separately, and I think that would run you $20-25 for probably 3 months worth.
As an FYI, though, I broke out the first week after giving up Proactiv for this, but it cleared up in a few days.
I would also recommend heading to the drug store and talking to the cosmetician. Yes, yes, I know cosmeticians are a bunch of charlatins just trying to shill product on the unsuspecting public :rolleyes: (says the former cosmetician); however, they do receive a lot of training on specific product properties and many would be perfectly happy to go through the products they have and find something that might work for you.
Benzoyl peroxide is benzoyl peroxide. It’s really the only “important” part of Proactiv’s stuff. There’s lots of preperations on the market that use it; my favorite (ie the cheapest) is, IIRC, made by Oxy. It comes in a black bottle that looks a bit like Axe body wash.
Half the reason proactive works isn’t the chemical, it’s the regiment. Apply it with roughly the same timing you were using on Proactive and your results should be similar.
In my opinion, the toner isn’t necessary. The two important components are the benzoyl peroxide (the more important of the two), and the cleansing/exfoliation portion. It all comes down to the reason for acne – Proactiv is designed to deal with a few major factores, specifically cleaning away oil and dead skin (which mechanically block pores), and benzoyl peroxide kills bacteria that can cause acne as well. Doing this routinely is the key portion. It’s a preventative product.
Benzoyl peroxide is easy to find. Note though that more may not be better as it is also a bleaching agent. Higher percentages (~6%+) are good for spot treatments, lower concentrations are best for the whole face.
Exfoliant cleansers are easy to find too. Make sure to use one suitable for people with acne – you do not want one of the ones aimed at the worried-about-aging crowd (which will tend to be oily), nor do you need ones that are really gritty. You don’t want to cause irritation, just routinely scrub away the dead skin cells before they slough off into pores.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Proactiv’s a good product. It is also pretty expensive so I understand why you might want to look at other options. Acne Free and other direct knock off Proactiv products are often really close in terms of ingredients, if you want to play it a little bit safe.
One other thing. If you decide to stick with Proactiv, there are a couple of ways to still save money. One example is that you may not need Proactiv’s treatment twice a day. You do need to use it routinely, but a lot of people who don’t have bad acne can easily get away with using it once a day. If you do this, and you are on the subscription program, call them and you can space out your shipments further apart (up to six months even, IIRC). If you buy any of their other products, this entitles you to keep the discount you get on them as well. You can also, if you call customer service, swap out the components in the kit as desired – for example, if you want to try stopping using the toner to see if it still works for you, you can get two lotions or two cleansers in your next kit instead. You’ll have to call each time you want to change the composition of the kit, but this helps save money if you don’t use the items at the same rate or want to omit one. These substitutions (as of the last time I was aware of their policy) were free of charge. If you swap back and forth between the two-cleanser-one-lotion and two-lotion-one-cleanser kits, etc., you can get more of what you need and then just decrease the frequency to the right amount.
Why not (with your dermatologist’s approval and supervision) just use Roaccutane? With only four months of slight discomfort, you can be free of acne forever. Insurance pays the bulk of the costs and then you would have no more creams and lotions to buy.
Thanks for the input, everybody. The drugstore.com search is very useful!
My acne cleared up with only one daily use of MUCH less product than Proactiv recommends, so I’m optimistic about continuing to treat it without dermatologists or accutane. If I’m wrong, I’ll let you know
What really worked for my (adult) acne was to do away with all soaps and cleansers. Instead, I’d (vigorously) wash my face 3, 4, maybe 6 times a day with just water. This was easy to do at work, school, after lunch, etc. I could feel the water wash away the oils and leave my face clean, but it wouldn’t dry out my skin like the cleansers. YYMV, but I still don’t use soap on my face unless it’s been somewhere exceptionally dirty.
I thought there was some evidence that accutane can have the side effect of Ulcerative Colitis, IBD, Crohn’s etc. That seems like a big price to pay to get rid of pimples; however, I don’t know how much medical evidence versus lawsuits is actually involved.
Check out acne.org. He recommends using a mild, non-exfoliating moisturizing facewash, followed by application as-needed (like you I didn’t need much and did fine with only one application daily) of a benzoyl peroxide lotion similar to Proactiv’s (he sells a great lotion for a very reasonable price, much more lotion for less than Proactiv’s), which does all the exfoliating and oxygenating your skin needs, and a moisturizing facial lotion to treat any resulting dryness/flakiness.
When I stopped using Proactiv I started using this method, buying only my BP lotion from acne.org, and it worked better than Proactiv’s system for a fraction of the cost.
In the past year I’ve cured my acne with diet/nutrition changes - lifestyle is a huge factor as well. My skin is the best it’s been since I was 14, I still can’t believe it. I barely have to wash my face any more (after 10 years of moderate to severe non-cystic acne and trying everything to treat it - yes, I tried water-only washing, oil cleansing - but unless I used benzoyl peroxide, my skin was a disaster area).
I’m sure you’ve already done this, but in case it hasn’t been mentioned…
If you are nursing, please consult your medical provider before using any medication. Some meds can be absorbed through the skin and show up in the mother’s milk.
Go to cosmeticscop.com and its sister site, beautypedia.com. On the former, read Paula Begoun’s articles on treating acne. If you go to the second site and look up Proactiv, you’ll see that it’s overpriced mediocrity and you can get the same active ingredients in a whole lot of other products for less money. Also, many of the celebrities who pitch Proactive ALSO had other treatments like Accutane. The fact that Proactiv worked for you means that you can spend less money and get the same results with the same active ingredients.
Roaccutane/Accutane is powerful stuff and certainly has a selection of both temporary and permanent side-effects; however, I do not believe that the connection between a significant increase in chronic intestinal ailments and the drug has been demonstrated.
The big difference between Roaccutane and other treatments is that Roaccutane actually cures acne. One or two cycles and you are done. No more zits, no more breakouts, nothing, from that point forward. If you were an obese person and you could take a pill for only a couple months that would not only cause you to lose the weight, but also keep you from ever being overweight again, what side-effects would you be willing to live with? That is what Roaccutane is to an adult with chronic acne.
Do you not like/do well on the prescription topical medicines like Retin-A (now Renova, I think) and the other one made by Galderma (Differin, I think)? Because usually insurance covers those.
Glycolic acid creams are all over the place. Alpha Hydrox is the cheapest, I use Merz’s Aqua Glycolic, which I think is very reasonable in price and am very happy with (it’s 10% glycolic to Alpha’s 12%). A pharma rep told me about it. Alpha Hydrox also has a potent retinol-esque one called ResQ but I am so happy with glycolic acid I have stopped the handwringing over losing my retin-a pipeline. I’m not sure what type of acne you have-mine at its worst is light-moderate and glycolic acid creams seem to treat it just fine.
If you’re handy, you could always buy the ingredients for everything from Skinactives and formulate something for yourself. For instance, making your own c-serum is de rigeur these days since people figured out skinceuticals was making like a 50000% profit on theirs. The typical acne based ingredients you’d want to look out for are hyaluronic acid, glycolic acid and Vitamin A. The people at SkinActives will help you out, you can also ask over at Essential DaySpa. The MakeUpAlley girls aren’t as do-it-yourselfy on their boards, I think. I’ve ordered some ferulic acid from them to make some C-serum on the cheap but those formulations are all over the internet so I can’t speak to their helpfulness, but apparently they are quite nice.
Also, I bought into the Clarisonic hype around Christmas and I think it’s an amazing tool that allows the topical stuff to penetrate deeper. But it is uber-expensive, which probably wouldn’t do much on the money saving front.
I bought a kit that is almost identical to Proactive at Walgreens. It’s made by University Medical and is called Acne Free. It was 19.99 and I get the same results as Proactive, it even smells the same and has the same size bottles.
