If You Have Acne, How Often Should You Wash Your Face?

Short and simple, but a lot of people either wonder about this and don’t know or, worse, they don’t know and don’t think about it at all, wash their face 5 times a day, and actually make their acne worse.

How often should you wash your face? Initially, I would wash it like 4 or 5 times a day, I’d wash it in the morning, I’d wash it in the school bathroom on lunch break, I’d wash it when I got home, and I’d wash it before I went to bed…terrible.  It dried out my skin, irritated it, and made it worse.  The only benefit was that my skin never actually looked oily because the oil never had a chance to build up.  However…

Washing your face this frequently, although it reduces the oil which might help a little bit, does something else that more than makes up for any good that it does…it weakens your skin.  It dries out your skin so much that it kills a lot of the skin cells and with that goes their ability to fight off the acne-causing bacteria, you’re killing your own immune system by doing this.  That allows the bacteria on your skin to thrive, which makes the problem worse.  It also triggers increased oil production because you’re drying out your skin, you’re taking it to the opposite extreme of too oily to too dry.

How often should you wash?

Twice a day (source: Discovery Health).  There, wasn’t that simple?  No one has skin so oily that they would honestly benefit from washing three times a day or more, you just don’t, trust me.

If you’ve been washing more frequently than that, stop, take it down to twice a day, give your skin a few days to realize that it doesn’t need to produce oil like crazy anymore because you’re not going to be washing it like crazy anymore, and see what happens (oil production will increase for a few days afterward because you were washing so frequently before, but it’ll come back down once it’s only been getting washed twice a day for a few days).

I hope that helps, guys, cheers,

Andrew