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Acne scars start with the formation of acne. This skin ailment starts when the skin is irritated by excess sebum, the oil that is usually produced by the sebaceous glands to moisturize and protect the skin. Outside factors to sebum production include hormone imbalance and high stress levels.

With increased sebum output, the delicate cells lining the hair follicle can be damaged as it makes its way to the skin's surface. In addition, different factors can cause this sebum to become even more irritating to the skin. Two of these factors are not enough essential fatty acids, which keep sebum in its more liquid state, and acne causing bacteria.

This physical state change means that sebum more easily blocks pores, trapping debris and bacteria inside, allowing them to multiply. The body then responds to fight off these antigens and protect the skin with an inflammatory response that can actually further wound the skin. In their fervent efforts to dispose of these foreign bodies, the immune cells can actually destroy healthy tissue surrounding the damaged cells and bacteria. Furthermore, the injury to the dermal layer also affects the amount of collagen found and produced, ultimately leaving a scar.

Body acne scars come both as hypertrophic and atrophic scars. Hypertrophic scars are those that extend from the normal level of skin and include keloid scars, which are hypertrophic scars that continue to expand in size. These types of scars are more commonly found on the chest or back than the face. Facial acne tends to cause atrophic scars, those that appear as dents or valleys in the skin. Ice pick, box car and rolling scars are hard to get rid of due to their formation; as damage extends all the way to the dermal layer where the injury was, these types of scars are tied down.

Facial Acne Scar Treatment Options

To rid facial acne scars, typical scar treatments will not work. For example, injecting steroids (like it is done in hypertrophic scars) to make them flat will not help. 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.

In laser resurfacing for facial acne scars, non-ablative lasers are used that send short pulses of high energy light over the skin. Converting into heat, the laser vaporizes the layers of skin away. This method does more than just laser face acne scars to make them disappear. Scar tissue is eradicated and fresh skin growth is encouraged to replace the tissue that 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.

Although there are other resurfacing options, they are not as successful. Utilizing dermabrasion on acne scars uses the same principle but is a less precise method. A dermabrasion treatment uses a high speed rotary instrument to exfoliate away layers of skin. Similarly, chemical peels on facial acne scars removes skin with a chemical solution that makes the skin blister and fall away.

Both techniques are applied to the whole face and are quite lengthy in their healing times.

You might also consider facial surgery for acne scars. Subcision refers to the method that cuts the deeper layers of the skin so it is no longer tied down. Punch techniques are helpful for the really deep scarring, such as ice pick scars. These techniques that remove the tissue with the contained scar include punch excision, punch excision with skin grafting and punch elevation.

Dermal fillers are a temporary solution for facial acne scars, raising lowered areas for a period of time, but requiring repeated injections as time goes on.