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Author	Topic: Acne and geography
Azure 09-16-2002 01:26 PM	Miss Wai: I have been noticing something very strange and I can't make any sense of it at all. I live in New York and I have always been suffering from mild/moderate acne. However, whenever I travel to certain cities I find that my acne dissapears. At first I thought that this was a coincidence but now I realize that it is definitely happening. A year ago I spent a week in Poconos, PA and at the end of my stay my skin was absolutely perfect. Whats even more interesting is that I was eating junk food and pretty much whatever I wanted every day. If I eat junk food in New York, my acne definitely gets worse. Then I had to take a business trip to Richardson, TX about 5 months ago. I checked into the hotel with lots of pimples. When I was checking out a week later my skin was again perfect, and I remember eating a whole box of KrispyKream donuts the night before. As soon as I got back to NYC within a few days my acne returned. I also notice that whenever I travel to LA my acne stays the same and there is no improvement. I shared this with my dermatologist and he thinks that this is my imagination. But I wanted to see what you make of this since you are the acne expert and you probably know a lot more about acne then my dermatologist does.
Wai 09-17-2002 11:00 AM	The secretion of sebum strongly affects acne, and is strongly subject to hormone levels. That is why acne is so periodical; because subject to fluctuating hormone levels. The secretion of sebum also depends on the humidity of the air, your cleansing regime, and to what extend the air around you is polluted. And then there is stress. So, there are so many factors in acne that can affect your acne when you travel from one environment to another, because all the environmental factors may influence your acne. BUT; I'm sure that when you would move to Poconos or Richardson, and you would eat bad foods while living there, that you would have acne anyway. I'm also pretty sure that when at one point your skin is clear and you then stay in one of these cities for a week, and you eat junk food, you will break out. We all had periods of clear skin, and they can coincide with pretty much anything. And these different circumstances may somewhat affect your acne, or not at all; with a periodical 'disease' as acne, any correlation is possible, until you start to examine this systematically, during a longer period of time. Are you on the sample diet now? Have you been eating munch foods lately? how is your skin doing?