Hey all,

About two years ago, after nearly 20 years of few acne breakouts, I suddenly started having cystic acne breakouts regularly. It was never quite bad enough for me to go to a dermatologist, though, lately I was considering going that route as it has been getting worse.

Now I had a lot of changes about the time this started happening so it was hard to pin down what exactly may have triggered it. Nothing I tried until recently helped -- cleansers, vitamins, ointments, using hypoallergenic detergents, exercise, etc. One thing that I never even considered, is that around the time this started, I also started drinking an off-the-shelf lemonade drink regularly. I always got sugar-free lemonade, thinking I was doing a good thing (but it was sweetened). Then I stumbled across an older post on here regarding possible affects of citrus. Now I rarely drink orange juice, but, it got me to thinking about the vast amount of lemonade I was drinking, especially in the evening. So I switched to using "natural" lemonade mix with glasses of water, and my breakouts stopped almost immediately. (I've also been sleeping MUCH better, which may also be making a difference.)

I'm guessing it must be the sweetener used in the drink I used to drink, and the large amount I drank in the evening. Does that sound like a reasonable culprit? (Hopefully I didn't just jinx it!)