Home care- hair and skin care remedies that could end up in damage

CHENNAI: It is very natural to want to fix minor skin problems on our own. For example, if you suspect that your hair loss could be because of lack of sleep, you can try sleeping early - and if that works out, it would be a great home remedy for you to always follow. However, there are some home remedies that do more damage than good.

The topmost are the remedies that people use, mistakenly, to treat acne. Applying garlic for acne is one of them. This causes anything from minor skin irritation to proper burns, which ends up in post-inflammatory pigmentation. The second most popular pimple home remedy is applying toothpaste. This also causes anything from mild skin peeling to burns and black marks. Do not apply coconut oil on acne pustules, thinking that it will reduce heat. It will invariably worsen the infection, due to more occlusion. Applying warmed coconut oil to the scalp to cool down the body, will only increase infection of the hair roots, called folliculitis. Boils are not due to heating up of tissues. Boils are actually caused by a bacterial infection, which is made worse by occluding the skin even more, with oils.

Next up are home remedies for complexion. YouTube teems with absurd videos, that show babies being scrubbed with pumice stone for fairness, and being massaged with physical scrubs to shed the darkness. Scrubbing only increases skin pigmentation and roughness, and should never be done even on adult skin, leave alone the delicate skin of babies. Using lemon juice for skin bleaching can go wrong, since lemon is a photosensitizer and can darken the skin by setting off a photosensitivity reaction. Another YouTube hazard is, content that advised the use of steroid creams for skin bleaching and skin fairness. Topical steroid use on the face can cause extreme side effects, some of which may not even be resersible stretch marks, for example. More than home remedies, these are what would be called as harmful quackery.

Home remedies for emergency skin problems, like applying caustic soda or baking powder on burns, or applying sand on skin injuries may cause serious harm.

So for the most part, the skin is best left alone with a good skin care routine. Following every trend/ home remedy ideas/ wrong content on YouTube, may make the skin less happy than it should be.

— Dr Renita Rajan, Chief Consultant Dermatologist, RENDER Skin and Hair