Acne scars begin with the appearance of acne. This problem begins when the skin is inundated with sebum, the oil that is produced by the sebaceous glands to moisturize and protect the skin. Outside factors to sebum production include hormone imbalance and high stress levels.

With elevated sebum secretion, the fragile cells that line the follicle can be damaged as the sebum pours through the canals to the surface. In addition, different factors can cause this sebum to become even more irritating to the skin. These factors include a deficiency in essential fatty acids, which keep the sebum oil from hardening, and acne causing bacteria.

The excess production of sebum ends in trapping debris, and causing the bacteria naturally found within the skin to multiply. The body's immune response to fight off these foreign bodies and protect the skin includes an inflammatory response that actually wounds the skin matrix. In their efforts to remove the antigens, immune cells destroy healthy, surrounding tissue. Furthermore, the injury to the dermal layer also affects the amount of collagen found and produced, ultimately leaving a scar.

Body acne scars can either be hypertrophic or atrophic. Hypertrophic refers to those scars that protrude from the skin, including keloid scars that, unlike typical hypertrophic scars, continue to expand in size. Both of these types of scars are more regularly found on the back or chest. The more common scars that result from facial acne are depressed or atrophic acne scars. Due to injury caused at the lower skin layers, ice pick, boxcar and rolling scars are bound down, making them difficult types of scars to treat.

Facial Acne Scar Treatment Options

To rid facial acne scars, typical scar treatments will not work. Injecting steroids (which have the action of flattening scars with too much collagen) will not decrease the visibility of these types of scars. In general, it is difficult to bring depressions up to the normal skin level.

To fill in these hollows, one must regenerate new, healthy skin cells. Facial resurfacing for acne scars is a method to raise your skin. Resurfacing methods differ in the removal of skin but all have the general idea of a controlled removal of skin to encourage healthy skin cell growth.

Laser resurfacing for facial acne scars utilizes non-ablative lasers that send brief pulses of high energy light over the skin. Converting into heat, the laser vaporizes the layers of skin away. However, you don't simply laser face acne scars away. The scar tissue is removed and new skin growth is stimulated to replace that which was removed. For a precise, safe method, laser skin resurfacing acne scars causes little outside damage to surrounding skin. For this reason, it is safe to use and so popular on facial scars.

Other resurfacing methods are less effective. Dermabrasion for acne scars is a less precise way of regenerating new skin. A dermabrasion treatment uses a high speed rotary instrument to exfoliate away layers of skin. Chemical peels on facial acne scars use similar thinking but peel away skin layers with a chemical solution that first causes the skin to blister.

These methods are typically applied to the entire face with lengthy recovery periods.

Facial surgery for acne scars might also be considered for depressed scars. Subcision refers to the method that cuts the deeper layers of the skin so it is no longer tied down. The various punch techniques are used for deep scars, especially ice pick. These procedures (punch excision, punch excision plus skin grafting and punch elevation) remove the tissue with the scar.

For a temporary solution, dermal fillers can be used to treat facial acne scars.