I am a seventeen-year-old who had terrible and repulsive acne for the past 3 years, and literally got rid of it in one week by putting a clean towel over my pillowcase every day.

Bear with me here! Because I struggled with acne for so long, it’s hard to not make such a long post, because of how passionate about the topic I’ve grown. I know I may seem a bit loony, but all I want to do through this post is try to help someone.

This isn’t a spam post/advertisement — I’ve got no products to promote, and I’m not even going to advocate types of soaps here (that isn’t to say soap doesn’t help). I’m just making this for the sake of hopefully helping my fellow acne-sufferers.

I’d been having terrible, disgusting, simply repulsive acne for the past 3 years. I even have literally ~100 (yes, I was that obsessive) close-up pictures of the sides of my face that I’d use for posts that would plead for some miracle solutions or at least some helpful knowledge on the Internet. I was ashamed when I went to school, and was entirely too ashamed to approach people, because I knew engaging in conversation would mean having to get close enough for them to see my flaws.

There would be a new formation waiting for me every day, if not multiple formations. My skin… felt… alive. And possessed. I went to several doctors and tried things like (here are the ones I can remember) Erythromycin, Tetracycline, Differin, Retin-A, Aqua Glycolic Acid, etc.

Chugged bottle after bottle after bottle of water every day because it was supposed to help (and it very well might have, to some extent, but it wasn’t noticeable to me).

I even went several months carefully crushing up aspirin pills, mixing them with just the right amount of water, and then spreading that all over my face because of how many times I’d read about the salicylic acid supposedly helping at least some people out.

Some of these things seemed to cause changes, but overall, nothing significant. And more importantly, nothing really made it go away. As if my own body was taunting me, whitehead after pimple after unappealing, unidentified bump would develop overnight, and I couldn’t stand to look at myself in sunlight any longer.

Anyways, well, the whole overnight thing? That information, as I would find, turned out to be key. It should have made the solution much more apparent to me, and I wish I’d just thought about it earlier, but what can you do?

As it turns out, my pillowcase was the problem. I guess I didn’t change it as often as I should have. I’d change it once every two weeks or so.

Was that a normal rate? Apparently not, but I never knew, and frankly, I never minded it. Regardless, even if my pillowcase gets changed every day, I’ve come to the decision that it’s never going to be clean enough for me to lay my face against. Instead, I’ve been laying down a freshly-washed, clean towel daily for my face to lie against. Like I said, it’s only been one week, and everything… is now… completely… gone.

Now, my skin is unbelievably smooth and even-toned — I almost feel like I’m a little kid again because of how clear my skin is. I love to look at myself in the mirror now. I’ve started to become more outgoing. I’m even looking forward to a date soon. Because of how simple this really was, I almost feel like this should be a FML. But oh well. Here it is. Here’s what I did. If you have acne, try this. Don’t just limit it to your pillowcase; do not let your even-somewhat dirty sheets come in contact with your bare skin anywhere your skin is affected. In the least, just try to be more aware of this, because I really, really think it will help you. After finding it out the hard way, I even Googled it to see if anyone else had similar results, and sure enough, they did.

If this is common sense to anyone else, I apologize. But don’t assume everyone else knows this just because you do. Three years of researching acne solutions never prompted me to even remotely ponder this. I’m an extremely hygienic person in every other sense. I just never… knew.

• CLIPPED FROM: ‘I am a seventeen-year-old who had terrible and repulsive acne for the past 3 years, and literally got rid of it in one week by putting a clean towel over my pillowcase every day’. (self.reddit.com), 2009-09-29