You’ve probably seen them before: pore strips, made to get rid of blackheads by simply pulling them out. You can find them in drugstores or even make your own with nontoxic glue and activated charcoal, but think again. These pore strips, usually placed on your nose, will pull out everything, from blackheads to sebaceous filaments. It’s these sebaceous filaments that are most worrying.
Sebaceous filaments are little hairs in your skin that allow the oil under your skin to escape. By pulling these out with pore strips, the oil under your skin can’t escape, which can lead to more pimples.
Furthermore, pore strips don’t even do a good job at their main purpose-unclogging pores. By physically pulling out blackheads, pore strips don’t get the deepest of the blackheads out. When you see the admittedly satisfying gunk that comes out of your nose with the strip, it’s actually only the top part of the blackhead. Below the skin where the pore strip cannot reach, there is still the same gunk clogging your pores.
A better alternative is using chemical exfoliants, such as cleansers with AHA and BHA. These will penetrate deep into your pores and dislodge the debris that clogs your pores.
