Using Honey for Treating Acne

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is Dr. Loreta Ciraldo from drloreta.com. Board certified dermatologist and author of Six Weeks to Sensational Skin. Let's talk about using honey for acne. Some of my acne patients have told me that they've discovered that if they put honey on an acne lesion, so another words, you get a pimple or something and you start to apply honey to it. You can do this two to three times a day. It seems to greatly calm down the lesion. Now, there hasn't been great scientific proof about the honey but I will tell you that certain things that we use for instance, glycolic acid for acne really is very similar to vinegar and of course, what, how it really kind of start was that some women start to put some vinegar on acne lesions and then that went back to the lab and they twitted a little bit and they came up with the glycolic acid which is a very similar to vinegar. The beauty about putting the honey on is that honey is very cohesive so it's going to kind of do two things. First of all , you will find that if it happens to calm down on your acne but the second thing it does is it does kind of produce this little barrier so that you're not able to pick at your acne because we dermatologist really don't like you to pick. Once you start to pick at an acne lesion, you're going to do a couple of things. You're going to first of all, inflame and prolong that lesion much more so that if you hadn't touched it and secondly, you're going to introduce the possibility of getting an acne scar. So, the good thing about the honey is it may calm the inflammation, make it go away sooner and better yet for some of us dermatologists is that we really believe that what that honey coating on, you're not going to be able to get to it and aggravate the acne lesion. So, again, if you like to try to put honey on your acne, it's not something you're going to put all over but put it on a new lesion, best on the first day you get it and see if it should work for you."