About a month ago, I started working at a coffee shop. About the same time - and I’m going to assume that this is a cause/effect situation - I started breaking out pretty badly. I mean my complexion just went to hell - and I’m not talking about a tiny, superficial sprinkling of acne, but really big, nasty, often under-the-skin zits.
I’ve always followed a pretty strident system of skincare and gotten acceptable results, but suddenly this same regimen only seems to be preventing me from going full-on pizza face rather than keeping me generally clear.
What’s going on?
Notes; I have to wear a baseball-style hat while on the job; I don’t recreationally wear hats like this, and it’s already gotten pretty stinky and nasty after only a few weeks. Could somehow be involved? (yet, the zits are predominantly on my cheeks and chin, not forehead).
Could nastiness in the air be involved? I’m constantly steaming milk, grinding beans, soshing coffee, spurting syrups, and so forth. I imagine that an aggregate of this ends up on my skin in one form or another.
WAG, all the steam is clogging up your pores. Or, perhaps there’s coffee dust in the air from the grinders that causing the problem. What about stress, is it a fast paced enviroment that you’re not used to?
Are you touching your face more because of all the stuff in the air? If you are wiping away sweat, steam, dust, etc. that could easily be irritating your skin and leading to breakouts.
Your allergic to the coffee. I can’t be in a room were they brew coffee or grind it. After a while if your nose plugs up and you have difficulty breathing you had better consider your allergic to it.
I used to have acne and read a lot about it. A lot of things from working in a coffee shop could make your acne worse.
The heat and steam in the air can make your skin and the skin around your pores swell up with moisture enough that oil and dead skin cells can’t get out as well as they could normally. Heat can increase oil production. Moisture on your skin from being in a humid environment can mean that dead skin cells that used to dust off normally in are now sticking to the surface. Even positive or mild stress can increase the cortisol in your blood and make your acne worse.
I’ve also read that some types of food on your skin will feed acne bacteria and make them multiply. I don’t know if that’s true, but even if it isn’t, the dead skin cells on your face that aren’t just falling off like they would in a drier environment can feed bacteria and cause it to multiply. Even if you are using antibacterials in your regimen, they don’t erradicate all traces of bacteria so if the conditions are right for the bacteria to multiply that can mean what worked before doesn’t work as well now.
Mostly treating acne yourself consists of countering those two big problems–the bacteria, and the oil and dead skin clogging your pores. Being in a hot, moist environment might just be unbalancing your usual efforts to keep the bacteria controlled and keeping the debris from clogging your pores. Just the stress of having a new job would be enough to make a lot of people’s acne flare up. I always found that heat and humidity made my skin worse, and even positive or mild stress could make it worse. I just wound up going on antibiotics because it’s just too much trouble trying to control all these factors consistently.
