How I Cleared My Adult Acne in My 30s — What Actually Made the Difference

My skin became the worst it had ever been after having a baby. I had persistent breakouts, especially around my jaw and temples, and products that I had always used just made my skin worse. It was ruining my confidence, so I decided to get to the bottom of it, and within about three months, my skin had completely changed. In this video I’m going to show you what I changed, what I think actually made the difference, and how I would approach persistent adult acne now. (Show before and after on screen).

The first thing I learned is that acne is rarely just about the spot that you can see. Acne is multifactorial, this means that things like Hormonal signalling, insulin signalling, inflammation, genetics, stress, the condition of your skin barrier, medication and lifestyle can all influence the skin, and the combination will be different from person to person. With any skin condition, there is always a root cause, but it usually needs a trigger and a drivers to present on the skin.

Whenever I talk about skin, I like to think about it a bit like a garden.

Imagine you want a beautiful thriving garden all year round, but suddenly weeds have started appearing everywhere. You can keep pulling the weeds out, or putting harsh chemicals on them to kill them, but if they keep coming back, at some point you have to ask: what is making this garden such a good environment for them to grow?

In this analogy, the weeds are the acne that we can see.

Then we have the conditions around the garden. Things like stress, sleep, nutrition, lifestyle and skincare. These can all influence how well your skin is able to regulate itself.

And underneath all of that is the soil, this is your individual biology. Things like genetics, hormone and androgen sensitivity, insulin signalling and inflammatory tendency.

A lot of the time there is a trigger. Perhaps a hormonal change like coming off the pill, for me it was having a baby or an period of intense stress or a major lifestyle change — this is akin to a bout of extreme weather. It can be the thing that tips an already vulnerable garden over the edge.

So instead of only pulling out, or trying to kill the weeds, I want to understand the weeds, the growing conditions, the soil and what has changed. So rather than asking, ‘What product gets rid of this spot?’, I started asking a different question: ‘What conditions are allowing this pattern to keep happening?

Because that gives us a much better idea of why your acne is happening and what might actually help it long term.

The second thing I changed was my mindset around my skin.

Your skin wants to heal. It is not the enemy and seeing it like the enemy may be keeping you stuck. Your body is constantly trying to return to balance, or homeostasis. Your skin isn't misbehaving or working against you. It is and intelligent organ, trying to function under the conditions it has been given. If we give it the right conditions, like I mentioned in the garden analogy, it will naturally move back toward that over time. It may just take longer than we want it to.

My strategy became less about forcing my skin into submission and more about creating better conditions for it to function, and looking at it lovingly and compassionately. I focused on repairing my barrier, reducing unnecessary irritation and giving it time. And psychologically, stopping seeing my skin as the enemy changed the decisions I made.

This one might be slightly controversial, but we have lowered the bar for what we call a healthy lifestyle.

And I say that as someone who absolutely did this myself. I exercised regularly, I ate fairly well, I cared about wellness. I would have described myself as a very healthy person. But when I looked more closely, there were still places where my body was dealing with a lot of load.

My hot take is that we’ve been sold a slightly distorted idea of “balance”.

Balance isn’t eating beautifully Monday to Friday and then regularly binge drinking at the weekend. It isn’t living on protein bars and supplements while barely eating whole foods. And health isn’t just going to the gym four times a week while scrolling until midnight and then sleeping five hours a night.

None of those things make you a bad person, and I’m not interested in perfection, but we should have higher standards for ourselves. Society uses the word balance to make bad habits sound neutral when our body may still be having to work quite hard to compensate for them.

And stress is the same. We tend to think of stress as feeling anxious or having a terrible boss or going through a major life event. But physiological stress is much broader than that.

It can be consistently poor sleep. Under-fuelling. Overtraining. Constant stimulation. Never switching off. Irregular meals. Or simply living at such a pace that your nervous system rarely gets a chance to properly come down.

So rather than asking myself, “Do I have a healthy lifestyle?”, I started asking:

“What is my body actually experiencing every day?”

And I did the same with food. Instead of deciding my diet was “healthy”, I looked at what it was actually made of. Was I getting enough fibre? Enough protein? Enough essential fats? Was most of my food coming from recognisable whole-food sources? How often was I drinking alcohol? Was I eating consistently enough to feel properly nourished?

For me, this wasn’t about becoming more restrictive. It was about becoming more intentional and deciding that I deserved better.Your body doesn’t respond to the label healthy it responds to the conditions you repeatedly give it.

So what ultimately helped to heal my skin?

I stopped looking for the one thing that was going to clear my acne.

I didn’t focus on one miracle product, cut out one food, or discovered one hidden root cause. It improved because I changed the overall environment my skin was living in.

I switched out all my skincare to a brand that focused on barrier support using the principles of corneotherapy (which I will do another video on later) and became much more focused on supporting my skin barrier rather than constantly attacking the breakouts. I paid much more attention to what I was eating, prioritising whole foods, enough protein, fibre and healthy fats, and I cut out processed food, sugar and alcohol. I became more conscious of things like sleep, stress, and the toxic load I was putting on my body.

And importantly, I didn’t reject conventional skincare or advanced skincare treatments either. Where they were appropriate, I used evidence-based treatments alongside those bigger lifestyle changes.

It was the combination that made the difference.

In clinic I always get asked “What product will clear my skin?” or “What food did should I cut out?” But for me, the better question is

“What does your skin need in order to function better? and are you actually willing to put the effort in to make the change?”

Once I started approaching it from that perspective, everything shifted and my skin cleared up. But I was determined, and you will need to be if you truly want to heal your skin.

So if you’re dealing with persistent acne in your 30s, I’d start by doing four things: look beyond the breakout itself, stop fighting your skin, look honestly at the conditions your body is living in, and stop searching for one magic fix.

Your skin is individual, so the answer won’t look exactly the same for everybody, but understanding your pattern is where I would start.