The Treatment of Fungal Acne: Skin Conditions That Are Often Misinterpreted As Acne
Reporting from Simple Skin Care Science, if you answer 'Yes' to most of the questions above, it is possible that what you have is not acne, but fungal acne. Fungal acne is a term for skin conditions that appear to resemble zits, namely pityrosporum folliculitis or malassezia folliculitis. Although at first glance it looks similar, the main difference between fungal acne and regular acne is the cause, the cause of acne is bacteria, while the cause of fungal acne is the Malassezia fungus.
What is Fungal Acne?
There are several species of Malassezia mushrooms, and each species will cause different skin conditions as well. Some skin conditions caused by Malassezia fungi are eczema, dandruff, psoriasis, and malassezia folliculitis or fungal acne. Mushroom species that are the culprit of fungal acne are Malassezia Globosa and Malassezia Furfur. Malassezia Furfur itself is a combination of Pityrosporum orbiculare and Pityrosporum ovale.
Causes of Fungal Acne
Actually, pityrosporum mushroom species can be found on human skin. However, when fungal levels increase, this species can infect hair follicles, causing dots that resemble zits. Well, the causes of this condition are:
- Internal factors such as consumption of drugs, illness, or pregnancy.
- External factors such as skin care products, humidity, hot air, or sweat.
Because one of the external factors that cause fungal acne is hot and humid air (which means the body also sweats more), the problem of fungal acne is usually found in tropical countries like Singapore, the Philippines, and Indonesia.
Contents to Avoid Skin with Fungal Acne
For internal factors such as health conditions, especially external factors such as weather and humidity, you certainly cannot have control to change that. Therefore, the cause of fungal acne that you can control is the use of skin care products to be one of the most important steps to free from fungal acne.
The fungi that cause fungal acne live on ‘eat’ fatty acids with certain carbon chains, which include the fatty acids themselves, oils, esters, and polysorbates. Therefore, the solution for treating the condition of fungal acne is to make the fungus cause fungal acne starvation by not giving it food, aka avoiding the fatty acids that are the food of the fungus.
Well, here are some names of ingredients that you need to avoid:
- Undecylenic Acid
- Lauric / Dodecanoic
- Tridecylic
- Stearic / Octadecanoic
- Oleic / Octadecenoic
- Linoleic
- Esther
- You can find the content of esters in the skin care content by looking for ingredients that end in –ate such as Isopropyl palmitate or Glyceril stearate.
- Polysorbate
- The content of fermentation, and much more.
The name of the womb which is enough to make the tongue dodgy will certainly be hard to remember. However, if you feel you have a problem with fungal acne, you don't have to bother memorizing the entire list of contents that should be avoided, really! You can confirm whether a product is safe or not for fungal acne by checking its contents on special websites like Sezia or SkinCarisma.
