An Acne Cream If You Don’t Want To Fuck Around

An annoying fact about me is that I have a lot of pimples. It’s terrible!! Controversial opinion, I know, but hear me out: I really hate pimples, and I’ll do/try almost anything to get rid of them.

For a long time I was using the Aesop zit cream — because even my blocked pores deserve the finest treatment — and found it to be quite effective. But I ran out of it last week and my chin situation was getting more than a little desperate. And, if we’re getting REAL real, because lol it’s Monday morning and why wouldn’t we, when it’s very hot out I have a tendency to break out on my chest, which is honestly the worst thing, particularly because my breasts are definitely the first and second best thing about me, and I was planning on wearing a very low-cut dress on Friday night for exactly that reason, and I needed some kind of acne spot treatment to give that dress a fighting chance without traveling an unreasonable distance to the nearest Aesop store.

Normally when I’m purchasing drugstore brand products I stick to Clean & Clear, but this time I went with the Neutrogena On-The-Spot just to ~mix it up~ and see if their promises of less benzoyl peroxide with more results was a real thing or just one more lie in this deceptive world.

Ok. Let me tell you. The people at Neutrogena are NOT lying. That cream blasted the zits right off my face. It was shockingly effective. Like, within hours, the pimples on my chin and jawline were noticeably smaller and significantly less red. So I tried putting a little on my chest. And then, intrigued by the excellent immediate results, I put a little more on. And then just another quick dab before I went to bed.

I woke up with the itchiest, reddest, most inflamed skin I’ve ever had. No pimples!! Just a general rash and a newfound respect for the power of chemicals we use to treat our blemishes. I shouldn’t have fucked around with the recommended dosage — “Apply once a day initially, then two or three times daily. If irritation or excess dryness occurs, reduce application to once a day” — and I recognize now that pride (low-cut dress) goes before the fall (zit-cream induced rashes? IDK). I almost took photos to prove how bad it was, but believe me, the last thing The Internet needs is a photo of my dumb and destructive vanity in action.

In the end, I wore a white t-shirt and a v. tight pencil skirt with a dangerous slit and dabbed a soothing oil on the redness until my body forgave me and grew a new layer of skin to replace the one I had basically burned off.

So this is a recommendation, yes, but with a reminder to practice safe skincare. Pimples might be terrible, but they are not worth corroding your chest for for.