A Las Vegas teenager’s Twitter update about how she cured her cystic acne has gone viral.
Hilda Paz Robles posted a before and after photo, taken less than a year apart, of the dramatic change in her skin’s condition. The first photo shows a bleeding, bumpy cheek with an acne breakout that almost looks like a rash. The second photo shows her skin’s transformation into much clearer, soft skin.
Robles journey to finding a cure started when she experienced her first breakout in April 2017.
She got a tip from her aunt to drink parsley tea, but she wasn’t a fan of tea. Her aunt then suggested she substitute it for green tea. Robles added raw honey to green tea that she had purchased at a 99 cents store, and began to see her acne condition improve, Allure reported.
The tweet showing the transformation has 12,000 likes, 3,500 retweets, and 267 comments. She told commenters asking about her skincare routine that she’ll reveal it more fully in a video post.
According to Allure, Robles doesn’t just drink the honey-infused tea, but takes the leaves out of the tea bags to use as a face mask and facial scrub as well.
“A lot of people don’t believe me,” Robles told Allure. “I’m not saying it’s going to work for everybody because I tried so many different things before that, and nothing was working.”
She supplements her natural remedy with over the counter products, including blackhead-reducing soaps and moisturizing cream. She started to use toner and face mists to help heal the scarring left behind. But the raw honey and green tea were the central ingredients to Robles’s recovery, Allure reported.
Cystic acne differs from regular acne because the pimples are embedded deeper in the skin.
Cysts filled with fluid form on the skin, but they’re too deep to pop and are painful to touch.
According to Rouleau, ordinary acne treatments don’t have much effect on cystic acne. “A lot of my clients use traditional spot treatments and end up with dry, flaky bumps, and nothing gets healed because these products aren’t designed to penetrate so many of the skin’s layers,” she says.