Psychological scarring from acne can endure long after the lesions themselves. Often there’s a residual fear that the spots might come back, which makes habits such as covering skin with makeup tough to break.
My advice is to step down in stages. You could add a little moisturiser to your usual foundation, thinning it out to make a DIY tinted moisturiser. Better still is a BB cream – a combination of skincare, sun protection and a little pigment for light coverage. BB creams also tend to have more skin-priming ingredients than tinted moisturisers, so they generally last longer on the skin and have a slight “blurring” effect, too.
We all deserve to feel confident in our own skin, but having been conditioned to aspire to look perfectly airbrushed, it can be tough to fully embrace it. If you’re feeling brave, you could try a “step away day” and ditch makeup entirely for one day.
This is a reminder that we deserve to be who we are, and that anything we wear is merely an accoutrement. You might find it hard at first, but even trying this once a month could help reduce your anxiety about being in public with bare skin.
Whatever path you choose, remember that perfect skin doesn’t exist outside beauty adverts and social media images. Both sell us a fake version of reality.
Got a beauty question for Anita? Email her at BeautyQandA@theguardian.com
