Natalie O'Neill

Fungal acne destroyed my love for summer for a whole year until I finally figured out how to crack it the following summer. The product I recommend is called Clever Soap Pyroctone Olamine Cream, and you can get it on Amazon for £9.99. It’s not perfect because I find the packaging very annoying, but ultimately it does work better than any kind of antifungal cream or shampoo. Especially shampoos can work, but they are very irritating, and a leave-on product is far more effective.

If you’ve tried it and you don’t think it’s working for you, it probably isn’t fungal. For a lot of people, they will have tried chemical exfoliants and retinoids without success, even if they’re struggling with clogged pores. It can take a while and a lot of trial and error to get the routine right, which is why I recommend my free retinoid guide, accessible from my links. That guide will show you exactly how to use a retinoid to get the results you need and unclog your pores.

As soon as I saw this girl’s video, I knew the comments would be flooded with people telling her that her freckles were just sun damage.

You can clearly see in her after videos that her freckles are still there. They’re just much more faded, which is exactly what mine look like. She has been working at a med spa for five years, which means she probably started to care more about sun protection, probably uses retinoids and/or chemical exfoliants, and more than likely seeks shade more than she used to.

I can understand this because it’s pretty much exactly what happened to me when I started caring more about my skin. I absolutely love my freckles, and I wish they could be out more, but that would require me to be getting more sun exposure than I want to have. My freckles are all still there; they’re just much more faded.

It really pains me when people don’t understand that freckles are not a sign of sun damage in the majority of people. Freckles can absolutely BE sun damage, but it’s typically when you’ve not really had freckles in your life and you go on holiday, maybe get burnt or have some intense days of sun. You then gain a few new little marks that you call freckles that don’t fade after the holiday and the sun exposure ends. That is typically sun damage, but the majority of freckly people just contain a gene which causes their melanin to clot together instead of being one even layer, like somebody with an even tan.

A flaky chin is one of the most annoying skin concerns you could have - especially if you’re not using a retinoid (and the answer is therefore obvious) you can easily get yourself into a nasty cycle of exfoliating every single day.

This person feels that their chin will be flaky if they don’t exfoliate daily, but the unfortunate truth is that they probably need to quit it for at least a few weeks. The chin is probably not gonna look that good in the interim, but when you’re in a rough bit sometimes about short-term pain for a long term gain.

right where I wanna be

At first I thought this was just TikTok shop crap, but when I saw that it was Medicube’s silicone pore brush I rolled my eyes even more.

It feels like we are not only repeating ourselves with toxic diet culture, but also with pointless consumerist skincare tools we don’t need - tell me why this is literally the exact same as Clarisonic from the 2000s.

In case you were tempted to buy this one - save your money, your skin doesn’t want you to use this on it. If your skincare routine isn’t working for you, I can promise you there are five other things that would be more effective than adding this in.

Stopping skin picking is genuinely one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do - since I started breaking out when I was 18, I had months where I wouldn’t go a day without picking. It’s not something you can just stop doing with willpower, and trying to do that is setting you up for failure which will make the cycle worse.

In this video, I share four ways I finally stopped skin picking for good - genuinely, I have not done this in years. Like I say in the video, I’ve even created the opposite association for myself - pimples give me the fear because I so badly DON’T want to pic them. Crazy what the mind can do.

Before you tell anyone to just stop skin picking (dermatillomania) remember that it’s actually a form of OCD, it can’t be helped unless you have the right tools.

AD in the summer I live, laugh, love instant fake tan and the Instant Glow Bronzing Mousse is 10/10