I've had fairly significant adult acne for a while. I had zits as a teenager, which pretty much went away for most of my twenties and early-thirties.

Things were mostly clear until December '04, when a whole bunch of stressful stuff happened at once. My skin took the brunt of it, and for the next year-and-almost-half some of the biggest, juiciest zits in (I'm pretty sure) the history of time appeared on my face. Multitudes, of the species that enjoy taking their sweet time healing, and love hanging out for weeks and weeks.

Of course, I tried all manner of over-the-counter stuff. I'm about to tell you what finally worked for me, but I've gotta give Neutrogena's On-the-Spot acne treatment a shout, 'cause hey ... it does what it's supposed to do. Dries up the zits, but won't leave the rest of your face all itchy and crackly. If you've got minor zittage, definitely give it a shot.

Anyway. By the time April rolled around, I decided I'm tired of dealing with this! so I asked my doctor for a dermatology referral. She gave me one, but asked if I'd be adverse to trying a low-dosage birth control pill for a while first, as it's been proven to control adult acne.

I said sure, and have been on Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo almost three months. It took about a month to notice results, but my acne problem cleared up pretty fast. I still get a zit from time to time, but nothing like before. They're tiny, and go away within a day or two.

The doc said this is a good pill to go on if you're older and don't want to get into all the Accutane stuff, or even if you're younger, and intend to get pregnant within a reasonable amount of time after going off the pill ("Lo" hormone dosage).

Personally, Accutane and pregnancy are equally unappealing to me, so it's almost like this stuff was made specifically with ME in mind.

It really took care of my skin problems -- just thought I'd pass it along. §her¡♣ said | heh? oh