My Skin and Fungal Acne Thoughts

I feel a little bit apprehensive writing about fungal acne or malassezia (pityrosporum) folliculitis because it seems to be treated as a trend and I'm no way sure I have it. However it has been interesting to find different causes for different types of acne and for me, some fungal acne treatments have been useful.

My skin doesn't seem to respond very well to ferments, especially saccharomyces could be a big trigger. I had developed during one night a lot of small bumps after using a product including it, and it took forever to clear (I didn't know about fungal acne back then). My skin doesn't seem to like being bombarded with products, sometimes I really feel that trying to keep it slightly dry helps with acne. Also, my acne is not cystic or huge pimples anymore. Now that I think about it, it's possible I've had fungal acne (in bursts) ever since I was a teenager. I got once a topical cream from my doctor for my forehead and back, but stopped applying it soon because it didn't seem to help my acne at all.

For a couple times now my forehead has had bursts of acne, that come out of nowhere. It starts on my scalp, on the hairline, and from there develops down to my forehead and also deeper to my scalp. Yes, it is ever so slightly itchy but I wouldn't say I went crazy scratching it. Especially because scratching made it worse, more like red splotches and they would hurt. The pimples were small, some of them had whitehead, some of them more like closed comedones. They would eventually spread but the worst places were my forehead, hairline, my eyebrows, between eyebrows and my moustache area (however that is called). Anyway, near the hairy parts of my face, my cheeks were clear.

Nothing seemed to help and it looked quite bad only after about 3 weeks. So. I decided to treat it as a fungal acne and started doing Head&Shoulders shampoo masks daily. (The old H&S, it has been reformulated without zinc pyrithione now). And in about 3 days, I think 70 % of the acne was gone. This was somewhere last year I think. 

This year the same repeated, and I tried the reformulated H&S. This time it took a week or a week and half for 70 % of the acne to disappear, I don't know if related to the formula change or not, maybe it was not fungal this time at all. I'm still using H&S to wash my hair and I leave it on my scalp for about 5 minutes before washing off. I must say my forehead is looking quite nice at the moment, only about 5-7 bumps, all close or in my hairline. 

I am not using a fungal acne safe routine, I don't think. Still these bursts of hairline acne are quite mysterious! Something is triggering them but I don't know what exactly, this year it started when I got sick. Be it fungal or not, I'm trying to do some upkeep now and either regularly mask both my face and scalp with antifungal shampoo (I bought 20 mg Nizoral shampoo for this, it's actually kinda expensive) or use antifungal cream. Also I'll keep checking ingredients more for the possible fungal feeding ones. I will also check out other shampoos meant for dandruff because they usually have antifungal ingredients and I want to see which ones are the best value for the performance.

My advice for anyone doubting about fungal acne is go ahead and treat it as such! I felt like an idiot for doing it for some reason. Yes, the shampoos do dry out the skin a bit and I was afraid of using almost all products, but squalane was a great friend. I would do the shampoo mask by applying a bit of shampoo on a dry skin only on areas with acne, wait about 10 minutes and wash off. When the acne started to disappear within days, I would mask less and shorter times to let my skin heal from the dryness.