Old Wives’ Tales in Skin Care: What’s True and What’s Not?

Sometimes the best tricks and hacks are the little things you picked up from your parents and grandparents, which they learned from their parents and grandparents going back one generation after another. For example, the next time you’re with your friends, ask them how they get rid of hiccups. Chances are that none of you will have the same answer but each of you will swear that the method you’ve been using since childhood is the best one.

But not all of the knowledge that’s passed down is actually true. Sometimes, old wives’ tales really are just tales. To help sort out fact from fiction, let’s take a look at some of the most common old wives’ tales when it comes to skin care.

Chocolate Causes Acne

This one actually has a nugget of truth within it. Foods with a high glycemic index like sugary foods (including chocolate) can contribute to breakouts. But it’s never that simple. Breakouts typically come from a combination of several factors that are much more intrinsic than your diet, like your hormones, your body’s oil production, how your skin sheds dead skin cells, and so on. 

Sugar can contribute, but you can’t blame a breakout entirely on a candy bar…unless, I suppose, you just smeared the chocolate bar on your face and it clogged your pores, but barring that, going chocolate-free won’t clear up acne.

Use Toothpaste as a Spot Treatment for a Pimple

Since so many of us had pimples in our teenage years, you’ve probably heard of using either toothpaste or a rubbing alcohol pad as a spot treatment for a pimple. At a glance, these DIY spot treatments might appear to work because they’re both extremely drying, so they make it look like the pimple has shrunk because they’re drying and shriveling the skin in the area.

But they don’t actually clear up the pore blockage, and because they’re so drying, they typically leave your skin far more irritated than it was to begin with. So now, you still have a pimple, but now the area around that pimple is red and angry, so it’s really drawing all the attention to that pimple. Not really the effect you were going for. Instead, use a specially formulated acne spot treatment.

Cold Water Closes Your Pores

When I was growing up, I remember hearing from several people that warm water opens pores and cold water closes them. As it turns out, that’s not true. In fact, pores don’t open and close - they don’t have a sphincter at all, so they generally are always the same size (although the size can slowly change over time, like getting larger and more visible as you get older and your skin becomes more lax).

With that said, though, warm water does do a better job of loosening up clogs in your pores, so it’s best to use warm water with your facial cleanser and in other aspects of your skin care routine.

Moisturizer Makes Oily Skin Worse

It’s pretty easy to see where this old wives’ tale came from. When it comes to your skin type, there’s a bit of a spectrum, with dry skin on one end and oily skin on the other end. So it’s understandable to assume that moisturizer replaces oil in dry skin, and that it then would make oily skin even more oily. Fortunately, that’s not exactly how moisturizer works.

Moisturizer has ingredients that hold water within your skin so that your skin doesn’t get dry. It’s not actually applying oil to your skin, and it doesn’t cause your skin to produce more oil. In fact, if you have oily skin, you might unknowingly be making your skin worse by skipping moisturizer, because your skin might be overproducing oil to try to make up for the hydration your skin is losing. A quality moisturizer just makes your skin’s hydration more balanced and consistent, regardless of your skin type.

So, Who Can You Trust for Skin Care?

All of the old wives’ tales above started as well-meaning misunderstandings of skin care, and they’re all reasonable assumptions to make if you don’t have any other information. But that’s the beauty of skin care: research builds on a daily basis, so we know far more about caring for skin today than we did back in the generations when these tips and tricks were formed. So make your grandparents proud and take advantage of the new knowledge you have that they didn’t, all for the benefit of glowing, healthy skin.