Looking for a way to decrease the size of your face pores? It can be a little confusing. On the one hand you’ll be told that face pores cannot be made smaller. On the other hand, you’re told that they can. The answer is somewhere in between, and there’s a bit of truth in both arguments. Generally speaking, the face pores you have, are what you have, and you can’t really make them any smaller. It is possible however to make them larger, something few of us want to have happen, but it does.
Most facial treatments, even those which may claim to make face pores smaller, really only make them appear smaller. However, when face pores are larger than one would like, it’s often because they are clogged with dead skin, keratin, or solidified oils, perhaps a little dirt as well. When this happens, the pores actually are forced to become larger to accommodate all the junk that’s in them. Remove what’s clogging them up and they may return to a more normal size. Some will, some will not.
Sebum, The Good, Bad And Ugly – Sebum, an oily substance we produce in our pores, benefits the skin by keeping it moist. At times however there can be an overproduction of sebum, a situation which causes what we call oily skin. This would not normally be harmful, except the sebum may solidify in the pores, together with dead skin cells, or whatever else is on the surface of the skin, clogging them, and causing the pores to enlarge. The accumulation of sebum and dead skin cells is natural, but we don’t want too much of it. Keeping the skin clean is one of the best ways to keep things in check; occasional exfoliation can help as well.
The T-Zone – Enlarged facial pores most often occur in the area around the nose and the chin, and above the eyebrows, called the T-zone. The area by the nose is one of the more oily areas on our skin, and a natural place for pore clogging and enlargement to occur. Clogged pores often result in the formation of blackheads or whiteheads, occasionally leading to infections.
Much of what is involved in reducing the size of face pores as well as keeping them clean of debris, is getting into a regular regimen of facial cleansing. Watching one’s diet by avoiding fatty foods, especially trans-fats, may help, but a healthy diet certainly won’t hurt any. Cleansing, as opposed to simply trying to cover things up with heavy makeup or cosmetics, is by far the best, and really the only effective approach. If face pores are a problem for you, take a little time to study the problem, discover its causes, and then search for what you think may be the best approach to solve the problem. It might be easier than you think.
What Can Be Done – We can’t reduce face pores to something less than their normal size, but we can do things to keep then from becoming enlarged, or if enlarged, they can often be caused to shrink back to their normal size. This is done mainly by cleansing them, extracting the foreign matter, and by taking steps to keep them clean. There are lotions, creams, facial masks and other treatments, including the well-known cucumber, which can effectively cleanse the pores and either make them shrink back to normal size or at least make them appear smaller. And treatment that tends to tighten the skin, even cool water, helps to some extent, at least temporarily. Besides raw cucumber, lemon juice is often beneficial, as are several other herbs and herbal remedies. Some of these agents appear to tone the tiny muscles in the face, in turn causing the pores to shrink to normal size.
