A Few Things you Need to Know About Acne Types

Acne has been known to have different shapes and sizes and you can often hear or read about lesions, comedons, papule, pustule, nodule and cyst. These are the most frequent Acne types and here you can read more about them and how you can fight Acne.

The lesion is known to be caused mostly by an injury or a disease. The external lesions that appear on the skin can be caused by Acne, cuts or skin cancer. So when you hear about Acne lesions you should thing of damage on the skin and sebaceous follicle caused by Acne.

Acne lesions have different shapes and depend on the type of Acne. The Acne lesions are: Comedons (the blackheads and whiteheads), pustules, nodules and cysts.

Comedons appear due to the clogging of the skin pore by dead cells that come from the sebaceous follicle, small hairs, and even bacteria. The blackheads are opened comedons and can be easily seen as they are black points on the skin surface. They are not black because they have dirt inside as some people might think; they are like this because oxygen gets in contact with the clogged sebum and turns it into black.
Whiteheads are closed comedons; they do not get in contact with oxygen and appear as bumps in the skin. These two types of comedons should be removed only by a specialist in sterile conditions in order to avoid skin infections with streptococci, staphylococci and other skin bacteria.

The papule is another Acne type; it has less than 5mm, is solid and is generally found in groups. If you touch the affected area you might have the sensation of touching sand.

The pustule is a fragile lesion that can contain pus produced from dead cells, leucocytes and bacteria. Most of them are forming over a sebaceous follicle that has a hair in its center. They can heal nice without leaving scars on the skin but only if they do not transform into the cystic form.

The macule appears after the pimple has healed and left behind a reddish flat spot. They generally disappear in a few days or weeks but they are so unpleasant because they contribute to the unaesthetic appearance of the face skin.

The nodule is a painful, hard dome-shaped lesion accompanied by inflammation that resembles the papule. After the nodule is gone a scar can remain on the skin because the nodule generally infiltrates the deeper layers of the skin where it causes tissue destructions.

The most severe Acne lesion is the cyst. It is a combination between a nodule and a pustule. Sometimes on the skin cysts and nodules can occur in the same time and then doctors refer to it as a Nodular-Cystic form of Acne. Sometimes the only effective treatment against the cysts is the therapy with Isotretinoin. This form of Acne is most likely to leave scars and maculae after healing and must be treated very careful and on a long term in order for the therapy to succeed.