Acne: New Light Treatments
When I was studying to become an esthetician, the teacher brought out a light that wouldn’t have looked out of place dangling from some sweatshop ceiling. It had a white bulb and we were supposed to stand there and hold it a few feet from our client’s face. There was a blue light and an infrared light too, languishing somewhere in the school basement.
Each were said to possess magical properties – the red light was healing, the white light benefited dry skin, the blue light resolved and prevented acne… I never pestered to have them exhumed from the basement, suspecting it was all a load of crap.
But then I began to read more and more about light treatments and began to change my mind - there is a kind of magic there.
In the early part of the 19th century, light clinics were part of the medical culture, helping to heal a variety of ailments, but were shoved out of the limelight (so to speak) when prescription medications became accepted as the only legitimate form of treatment. Shame.
Some wavelengths are healing, some are nurturing, some are destructive and all actions can be used to improve skin conditions. In the case of acne, it’s the damage that benefits.
Acne sufferers have always contended that their condition is helped by sunlight. And we, estheticians and dermatologists, recoil at the suggestion and say that the drying out process is temporary and the skin will pay by the increase in inflammation and ensuing damage. We were all right – except it wasn’t just the ‘drying out’ that benefited acne. Sunlight contains wavelengths that actually mitigate one of the main causes of acne.
So, enter ‘Blue Light’ therapy, which prunes away the broader spectrum to those beneficial wavelengths – it’s a fancier, more modern take on those antiquated lights we used to suspend above our clients. Clients sit enclosed in a three sided box of lights for about 15 minutes, a few times a week, for about 8 weeks. The light functions as an antibiotic. Blue light actually induces bacterial suicide.
Reading the studies, there’s hope, but it’s tempered. The efficacy probably falls somewhere between topical antibacterial solutions and oral antibiotics. As p.acnes (the bacteria instrumental to acne) develops more and more resistance in general to prescribed antibiotics, light treatments may, by necessity, become a more common solution. Turnabout is fair play.
What really gets interesting to me is the combination of light therapy and a prescription solution called Levulan Kerastick – when we start to see both a reduction of p.acnes and a reduction in the oil gland size and activity, something that could only be achieved before through Accutane (or aging). But more on that in our next article.
