Episode 73 - How I Healed Cystic Acne After 15 Years of Struggle

🐚Topics covered

• Personal journey with cystic acne from age 11 into 20s & shame around it
• Birth control pill clearing acne temporarily then returning worse on body
• First acne-free experience in Colombian Amazon: no artificial light, natural rhythm
• Environment as foundation: light exposure, circadian rhythm, meal timing, movement
• Unique approach beyond blood sugar: light, mitochondrial health, cellular hydration
• How light & darkness function as nutrients for skin health
• Oil-based products worsening dehydrated acne-prone skin
• Reconsidering sunscreen use for acne healing
• Daily skin practices: massage, dry brushing, cupping techniques
• Quantum Skin Health masterclass series announcement

MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE QUANTUM SKIN HEALTH MASTERCLASS SERIES: https://cycleseeds.activehosted.com/f/25

About the Host

I’m Iris Josephina, a functional hormone specialist, orthomolecular hormone coach, circadian biology practitioner, and entrepreneur. Through Cycle Seeds and The Inner Rhythms Podcast, I support people in reconnecting with their cyclical nature, deepening body literacy, and reclaiming hormonal harmony from a place of sovereignty and embodied knowledge. Most people know me from Instagram, where I share stories, tools, and inspiration on cyclical living, menstrual cycles, fertility, hormones, and more. 

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📝 Check out the blog: https://www.cycleseeds.com/blog

📚Join my courses: https://www.cycleseeds.com/courses-masterclasses 

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Iris Josephina: You are listening to the podcast of Iris Josephina. If you are passionate about exploring the menstrual cycle, cyclical living, body wisdom, personal growth, spirituality, and running a business in alignment with your natural cycles, you're in the right place. I'm Iris. I'm an entrepreneur, functional hormone specialist, trainer and coach, and I am on a mission

[00:00:29] Iris Josephina: to share insights, fun facts, and inspiration I discover along the way as I run my business and walk my own path on earth. Here you'll hear my personal stories, guest interviews, and vulnerable shares from clients and students. Most people know me from Instagram where you can find me under at cycle seeds, or they have been a coaching client or student in one of my courses.

[00:00:52] Iris Josephina: I'm so grateful you're here. Let's dive into today's episode.

[00:00:56] Iris Josephina: Hey, thank you for listening to this episode. I need to start off with a little heads up because I have a kitten maybe you saw on my social media. His name is Bibo and he is laying next to me on the guest bed. He's Puring, so maybe you can hear it, maybe not. But sometimes he comes because he wants me to be close to him.

[00:01:20] Iris Josephina: So it could be that while I'm recording, maybe he comes and joins us. I don't know, maybe we'll see. So today I wanna share a personal story about a topic that I have actually never talked about. And I was preparing for this episode and I really had to sit down with myself, and I was like, Iris, you have never shared about the topic of acne with your audience, like your personal story, you've never shared it.

[00:01:52] Iris Josephina: And I really had to ask myself like, why not? And the answer is because I was ashamed. I have struggled with acne from the age of 11 until well into my twenties. That's a lot of years and it's been a huge part of my life, but it's the part of my life that I have wanted to push under the rug and hide and never speak about because it's also been like a really sad and dark part of my life. It's also the thing that I've always felt the most insecure about when people would ask me like, what do you feel the most insecure about when it comes to your body? It's my skin. And it's weird to say now still, because my skin looks pretty good and pretty glowy and people who you know, have never met me when I was younger, and they only know me with this skin.

[00:03:03] Iris Josephina: People are like, what are you talking about? You have good skin. But it wasn't always this way. I struggled with my skin, like I said, since I was 11 years old, like my hormones kicked in and my skin was like, let's give this girl hormonal acne, like cystic acne, and it was horrible. It was terrible. It hurts so much.

[00:03:25] Iris Josephina: If you've had cystic acne, you know what I'm talking about. The pain that you feel like the acne coming up like the day before and you know how much it's gonna hurt the next day and there's really nothing you can do, or that's what I thought. It sucks. And I just wanna say that, you know, if you're struggling with your skin, if you're struggling with acne, I really, really feel you.

[00:03:54] Iris Josephina: It's terrible. And it can hurt like physically, but also emotionally, mentally. It was definitely like that for me, and I had to disconnect for myself a lot of times in my life because I could not cope with what my face looked like. And I wasn't the only one that had something to say about it. Kids can be mean. I mean, I love kids, but kids can be mean, and kids were definitely mean towards me. When I started to hit puberty and my skin started changing and I was one of the first girls in my class to get my period, and then the acne came and many people had things to say about it. It made me extremely self-conscious about my skin and what it looked like and the fact that other people could really see what was going on, and it's just been this big part of me that I've really struggled with.

[00:05:04] Iris Josephina: And like I said, it feels weird to say that because right now I have. good skin for someone who is 35. I have good skin. And my skin is glowy and it's soft, and it's, you know, plump. But it wasn't always this way and I really struggled. And I found ways to support my skin and to get to this glowy skin that I have today.

[00:05:38] Iris Josephina: And I just wanna walk you through all of the things that I quote unquote did wrong and what really started to move the needle. So obviously I have tried probably every single skincare product under the sun that was targeted to heal acne. When I was in primary school or just moving to high school, my mom would already take me to a dermatologist and I was put on this extremely violent skincare routine with like

[00:06:18] Iris Josephina: seven different steps with products that would literally feel like my skin was burning all the time. Like as soon as I put the products on, my skin was literally on fire. It hurt so much. It hurt so bad. And up until today, I actually have no idea what was in these products. I was just like, okay, this lady said I should take this and do this, so I'll do it.

[00:06:44] Iris Josephina: It didn't really help my acne. I think there was even like a type of peroxide. Oh my God, nevermind. It was, the products were terrible. So I have tried those types of products like so many times and none of them worked because at the time when I was doing just the products and not looking at my diet, not looking at supplementation or any deficiencies, I was a vegetarian.

[00:07:18] Iris Josephina: I was, you know, not looking at supplements or anything. I wasn't looking at how I was moving. I wasn't looking at what I was eating, how I was eating, how what I was eating or what I was not eating would, impact my skin. Nothing, none of it. And at a certain point I was just done.

[00:07:40] Iris Josephina: And I was 15 at the time and I was like, I've had enough. I want to take a pill to clear my acne. And the most famous pill at the time was the heaviest birth control pill. And I was determined. I read on forum, online that women really benefited from that. And I was like, you know what? I'm gonna go to my doctor and I'm gonna ask for this.

[00:08:11] Iris Josephina: I also had a boyfriend at the time, and I really wanted to get the birth control pill, so it was like great. Two things at once. So I went to my doctor and I said, look, I have this acne. I don't want this acne anymore. And I heard this pill works. I want this pill. And my doctor was like, okay, fine. And she wrote this pill for three months and I took it.

[00:08:35] Iris Josephina: Obviously this pill made me feel like shit, but my skin started to clear up. So I took it and I kept taking it for a couple of years, but then at a certain point, my cystic acne started to come back, not only on my face, also on my chest, also on my shoulders, also on my back, like my whole back. And I was just desperate.

[00:09:07] Iris Josephina: Absolutely desperate. And I didn't know what to do, and this just, you know, happened well into my twenties, and I just coped with it. I was so tired of managing my skin, like the mental load of having to think like, what will other people think about my skin? If I meet people for the first time, they're gonna look at my cystic acne.

[00:09:39] Iris Josephina: It was everywhere. Everything I was doing, like boyfriends like, oh my God, I can't meet my boyfriend right now because I have this gigantic outbreak of cystic acne. It was just terrible. It was really terrible and things really started to shift and change for me.

[00:10:03] Iris Josephina: When I started to put myself in environments that

[00:10:10] Iris Josephina: were supportive for my health and my first experience. I'm actually thinking about this now. I didn't write this down when I was preparing for this episode, actually, but actually my first experience where my skin completely cleared up was when I was 21. I may have shared this story before about the pill that I had shifted to a different pill, when I was 21, because this one pill that messed up my skin, it made my boobs so big that I just couldn't cope with it.

[00:10:51] Iris Josephina: So I changed to another pill, and this pill made me go numb in my leg, and it was about the time that I was embarking on a solo journey to the Colombian Amazon. So I started taking this pill like a couple of days before I left, like one day, two days before I left. And then I woke up there in Colombia and I didn't feel my leg, and it lasted for 26 hours.

[00:11:25] Iris Josephina: And my doctor in the Netherlands said, I should immediately stop with this new pill. And the feeling in my leg went away. And there I was not on a pill at all for the first time in 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 6 years for the first time in six years, and I was in the Amazon with no artificial light at night, specifically in a natural environment

[00:12:02] Iris Josephina: proper rhythm of breakfast, lunch, dinner, and sweating a lot. And this was actually the first time where my skin cleared up. And where I had no cystic acne, I had no outbreaks, and my skin looked amazing. And this is the first moment that I started to think like, huh, this is really something. And then I went back to the Netherlands within three weeks.

[00:12:38] Iris Josephina: I had spent over a month in Colombia, within three weeks I started to have cystic acne again. And that's the first moment where I started to think about like my environment and the impact of my environment. And with environment, I mean like the weather outside. Yes. But also how much light exposure is there, how much sun is there available?

[00:13:05] Iris Josephina: What are the temperatures like? But also, what am I eating? What am I feeding my body? When am I feeding my body? How am I feeding my body? And this is where I started to read everything I could about the skin and trying to educate myself because how could it be that I was acne free? For almost a month to then come back to a westernized society in a city and have my skin be messed up.

[00:13:45] Iris Josephina: Like how is that possible? So I started to research many, many things and over the course of that moment, and you know, my career start in hormone health. And everything that I've learned along the way, I've applied everything of which I thought would work for my skin. And lo and behold, today, I, I mean, I still have some imperfections, but my skin is glowy.

[00:14:22] Iris Josephina: It's soft. I barely have any wrinkles. And my skin is plump and I barely ever have breakouts, and I can exactly tell when a breakout will happen because it will be dependent on the environment I've put my body in. And when environment, like again, I mean everything like how have I eaten? How have I slept?

[00:14:47] Iris Josephina: How much light have I seen? How much darkness have I seen? How much have I moved my skin? How much have I stretched my skin and supported my skin? How much have I taken care of my meals and my proteins and my fats and the type of foods that I'm eating? So there are so many layers to this, and I really want this for other women.

[00:15:16] Iris Josephina: I want other women with acne to feel what is possible and to feel what it feels like to have the power to support your skin and let it respond to an environment it needs to thrive. And I think I take a pretty unique lens here compared to, you know, other hormone coaches or hormone specialists, because, you know, everyone talks about the blood sugar.

[00:15:53] Iris Josephina: Okay? Yes, blood sugar is a huge factor, but we also have to talk about light and circadian rhythm and how they are connected to your female cycle. We have to talk about mitochondrial health and the connection with collagen. I've done so much research on mitochondrial health, easy water, cellular hydration, and collagen, and how that connects to skin.

[00:16:26] Iris Josephina: I have looked at how the skin responds to light and how light is a nutrient for the skin, but also how darkness can be considered a nutrient for the skin. And I have put so many things in place to give my skin the best environment. Inside of my body and outside of my body so that my skin could do nothing else but just respond to the environment.

[00:16:58] Iris Josephina: And this is what has gotten my glow. This is what has cleared my acne. And it was not just one magical product. It was a lot of time researching, a lot of time of trial and error, but I got it so right that I applied this method with my clients as well and see like, let me see how it works for them. Lo and behold, their skin also just started to respond and you know, our skin is, is one of the most honest reflections on what our body needs.

[00:17:36] Iris Josephina: Like skin is very vocal, visibly vocal, and it's up to us to interpret it and to respond. And it was, you know, it was not a protocol that helped me, like not some strict protocol. It was really a shift in. One, how I approach my skin, how I think about my skin, the knowledge I have gathered about my skin, and the different skin layers, and what the different jobs are of each skin layer, how they're responding to light, to darkness, and

[00:18:15] Iris Josephina: what kind of products do support my skin? Because I followed a lot of just blind advice. Like, oh, you need to use tallow. Oh, you need to use oils. Oh, you need to use this magic O rose oil or lotus oil. Oil. Oil, oil. And I came to understand that oil is actually not the best for a lot of people's skins these days because some of the.

[00:18:44] Iris Josephina: Some of the most important things that we overlook is that when we have acne, there is a lot of sebum production and the skin feels very oily already. But a lot of people with acne also have dehydrated skin. Like the worst thing you can do for dehydrated skin is put a lot of oil on it. Like I had to learn it the hard way.

[00:19:12] Iris Josephina: I thought I was doing all the right things. I was not doing all the right things. And so I really had to research like, what do products do? And you know, you know me, I wanna keep things as natural as possible. So I really had to dive deep into the types of products that I put on my body and my skin. And when, when am I putting the product?

[00:19:38] Iris Josephina: And one of the products I really had to reconsider was sunscreen because for people with acne, wearing sunscreen all the time may not be the best option. And you know, I had to do a complete rewiring of how I thought about my skin, what I thought was okay to do. And I've put a system in place to. Really support my skin and I'm finally ready to share this with the world.

[00:20:16] Iris Josephina: And I think I just needed a lot of time to accept my own story and how intense it's been and how, how lonely I felt. And I really needed to do like some therapy around this and some, you know, trauma healing, to really be able to sit here and talk to you and be able to say, with honesty and not with like, all, lemme just say this to people, but really be able to say with honesty that I, I like my skin now.

[00:20:49] Iris Josephina: I love how it looks and how it feels, and I'm so grateful that. I understand my skin, I understand what she's trying to tell me, and I don't loathe my skin anymore when something has to be communicated with me through a breakout. I mean, I barely ever have breakouts anymore, but if it does happen, I'm not loathing myself.

[00:21:21] Iris Josephina: I'm not going into like this shame spiral of like, oh, I can't go out because people will see my skin and they can't see my skin. I'm, I have become much more compassionate towards my skin, towards my body, and I want this for other women and I'm ready to share this. So I have decided that I need to create this, like I actually have no choice.

[00:21:51] Iris Josephina: I have decided this and it needs to go into the world. I have the desire to create a three part series called Quantum Skin Health, where I will share everything I have learned, like the science about the skin and how it works and what it needs. As well as a practical guide on how you can support your skin and how you can hands on engage with your skin.

[00:22:29] Iris Josephina: Like one of the things that I do every day is massage my skin with specific products. Like I have dry brushes, I have cups, I use my hands. I have all these techniques that I learned over the years, and it's so amazing. To do and it feels amazing. And the way that I, you know, wake up in the morning and I look at my skin and I'm like, wow, I like my skin.

[00:22:56] Iris Josephina: And it just feels so special and so empowering to know that, you know, I did that. I listened to my skin. I started to learn about her. I started to respond to her in different ways, and then she just started to respond back to me by becoming clear, by giving me a glow, by giving me, you know, just a radiant skin.

[00:23:28] Iris Josephina: It's something that I've always wanted and I now have it and it's not leaving me, and it's just, I think I've said this on social media the other day, like it's my biggest accomplishment, like for, for my body with my relationship with my body. You know, even more than embracing my menstrual cycle, my biggest accomplishment is supporting my skin in such a way that it now glows and is clear.

[00:24:01] Iris Josephina: And I want that for you. So you can go in the show notes to see how you can grab the masterclass series. And I can't wait to see you there. And I just wanna say. There are ways to support your skin. I thought though, you know, it was a dead end. There was nothing to do. There are many, many things that you can do to support your skin, and I promise you that your body will start responding and you'll see that your efforts and your dedication, devotion to be with your skin and support her.

[00:24:44] Iris Josephina: Will pay off. So thank you so much for listening to this episode. I really appreciate that you're here. I really appreciate that you made it to the end. And, you know, heard me talk about one of the things that I have not wanted to talk about for like 15 years. yeah, thank you for being here. If you know you wanna share something about your skin or

[00:25:09] Iris Josephina: you know how you felt during this episode, or you know, something that you have experienced with your skin. Please feel free to DM me on Instagram or comment under the under the podcast. I'm happy to listen to you and please know that you're not alone. And if you want change, please join the masterclass series.

[00:25:32] Iris Josephina: I promise you it's going to be epic. Thank you so much for listening.

[00:25:38] Iris Josephina: Okay, this wraps up today's episode. Thank you so much for listening. Want to know more about me? The best way to reach me is via at Cycle Seeds on Instagram, and if you heard something today and you think, oh my God, wow, I learned something new. Feel free to share the podcast on your social media and tag me or leave a review of rating.

[00:26:00] Iris Josephina: In this way, you help me reach more people like you. Thank you so much. I.