Few things in life can be as distressing as an acute acne infection. Granted, acne is not one of those problems that you suffer in isolation, because in every decent-sized group of people (especially where there youths and expectant mothers are well represented), you are likely to identify more than one acne sufferers. Yet the fact that other people also go through the condition, (with statistics showing that the number of people who get acne in their teenage is greater than the number of those who don’t) offers little consolation to acne sufferers, who have a tendency to feel that their case of the condition is much worse than it really is.
There are a number of reasons as to why acne is the highly distressing condition it is.
The first, and literally most obvious of these, of course, is the fact that acne is a disfiguring condition, one that interferes with a person’s physical appearance. Now in days gone by, this would not have been a very disturbing affair – but we are living in an extremely image conscious society today: where people are judged more for their physical appearance than anything else. Now by its very nature, acne tends to afflict a person in such a way that it inevitably gets into the equation that determines whether the person in question is ‘cute’ or not; and while the person might have all the other hallmarks of ‘cuteness’ – the right facial symmetry, the right skin pigmentation and so on, as long as they happen to have acne on their face, their overall score on ‘cuteness’ ends up being pulled down by that very factor.
The fact that acne tends to affect people in their teenage years is another factor why it can be so distressing. Having identified the impact that acne has on a sufferer’s physical appearance, it is worth mentioning that while the whole society nowadays is extremely ‘image conscious,’ certain segments of the society, especially the teenagers and the young adults are naturally more image conscious than others. Bring in the fact that acne tends to afflict people during these exact points in their life, and you see why it can be such a distressing condition.
Of course, even where acne happens to afflict people in the years beyond their teenage (the form of acne referred to as adult acne), it is still very distressing; and perhaps even more so since this time it is going against the norm: acne is expected to a teenager’s problem.
Another factor that explains why acne can be such a distressing condition is the fact that most of the treatments available for combating it tend to be rather slow in their action. Now this becomes a source of distress when you take into consideration the fact that acne tends to afflict people in the years of their lives when they haven’t yet learnt the virtues of patience, so that they hop from treatment to treatment in search of an instant cure for the condition, in the process often spending huge sums of money they can’t afford to lose.