Your Skin & Coffee!

When you’re in a balanced mood, your vision is clear and your mind becomes phosphoric 😉 Welcome back our friends from the US, Brazil, Ireland, Russia, Ukraine, and Norway 😉

If you’ve ever seen a dermatologist for acne, or any kind of inflammation, really, I bet you’ve heard this advice before: Stop drinking coffee. I’ve encountered those words many times, but never acted on them. Until recently, that is, when my curiosity (and quest for better skin) finally overtook my caffeine addiction.

You always hear people swear that giving up [insert vice here] changed everything for their skin. Most often, it’s dairy, sugar, wheat, or coffee. With countless dermatologists telling me that cutting coffee is what would finally take care of my pesky breakouts, I retired my Starbucks card in the name of better skin.

Why is coffee coffee the culprit? Long, scientific story short: It’s because coffee is highly acidic. High doses of acidic caffeine mess with your hormones, namely your stress hormones, which control your skin’s oil production. On top of that, it can act as a diuretic, dehydrating your skin if you drink too much. I fall shy of the four-cups-a-day group, so I think I’m safe on the dehydration front, but the rest I can’t dispute.

My breakouts finally cleared up in week three, and I have to admit, my skin looked smoother and more healed than normal. The little breakouts that tend to linger all but disappeared, and the pores that always give me trouble looked less congested than usual. I’m not going to say my skin looked J.Lo glowy, but I wasn’t hating the experiment as much I was early on.

The other change I observed was in my skin’s moisture level. I almost always have a few dry patches around my nose and chin, but by week three my skin was far less parched, leading me to believe that perhaps I wasn’t exempt from the dehydrating effects of coffee.

Let’s get real here: My skin didn’t magically transform into airbrushed flawlessness over the three weeks, but if I could do it again, I wouldn’t have caved on day 23 and had that iced latte. I think if I were to truly give up coffee long-term, I’d be pretty pleased with the results.