Warning : Following these instructions blindly can be hazardous to your health. Not to mention your face.

Acne Home Treatment Number One:

Pick at, squeeze, poke the offending pimple. Do whatever you can to hurt it. Maybe it will get the message and go away. In the meantime, it is therapeutic for the soul. Make sure you squeeze really hard to get the horrible pus to pop out.

I had a friend who did that. He had a huge pimple on the tip of his nose and needed to get rid of it quickly. A few hard squeezes and he reckoned it would pop nicely. Instead of popping nicely, as he planned, it doubled in size, became inflamed and painful, and he spent the next two weeks of his life being called "Rudolph" by unfeeling friends. His efforts also left behind a scar that lasted for the next six months.

I also heard of a friend of a friend who did the same thing. His pimple was between the angle of the nose and his left eye. After a particularly frustrating day, he gave it a few hard squeezes. Not only did it swell up, it spread out, developed into a full-blown skin infection ( his doctors called it "cellulitis") and landed him up in the emergency department. There, he had to endure getting his pimple, which had become a boil, excised to drain the pus, got a course of intravenous antibiotics, and had to endure being referred to as 'The Pimple in Bed 6" for a week by insensitive hospital staff.

Acne Home Treatment Number Two:

Use the strongest antiseptic you can find on the offending spot. After all, the books say it contains bacteria and you really want to kill those nasty little germs off.

A dear friend did just that. She put concentrated antiseptic on her spot. It got rid of it all right. She ended up with a chemical burn over the spot, and a scar that lasted several weeks. She decided against washing the rest of her face with the same agent after that.

Acne Home Treatment Number Three :

Cover the spots in plasters. If they are covered, nobody will notice them.

That really worked. One friend covered his biggest pimple with a plaster, hoping nobody would notice the spot. Nobody did. Everyone spent the rest of the day asking him why he had a plaster covering his nose !

Acne Home Treatment Number Four:

Get a sunburn. Go out in the sun, forget the sunblock and get really burnt. The nice tanned look should hide the redness of the skin, maybe those nasty little spots would get burnt away, and if they don't, maybe the peel after the sunburn will remove them.

I have met a few people who tried out this form of acne treatment. Gentle sun exposure helps. But some of these dear people overdid it, to put it mildly. They ended up with wrinkled , weatherbeaten faces, looking years older than they were. Some even had freckles and little brown "age spots" as well as little broken blood vessels all over the skin. Fortunately none had developed any skin cancers.

Acne Home Treatment Number Five:

Just keep washing your face. Over and over again. About twenty times a day. Acne is caused by excessive oiliness so washing the face frequently should cure that problem.

A friend I know tried out that remedy. She managed to keep her face oil-free. But so were her hands, leaving her with dry cracked hands. And her mother was seriously considering taking her to see a psychiatrist and having her admitted for treatment of her obsessive compulsive disorder.

I do hope you realise these are not the best methods of treating acne