In my honest opinion: you should never crush or bruise an a big round pustule with your blunt fingers if you can pierce it with a disinfected needle.

So those who have never used a needle, listen up!!!

The problem with pustules is that they sometimes form deep under your the skin and are trapped there, impossible to crush. if you try, you will cause a bruise, which will be open to infection, and the microbes will spread to the surrounding area.

that is where a needle comes in. a disinfected sowing needle or a very sharp pin. it is less painful and cleaner, so that you have the satisfaction of squeezing out impossible and nasty zits from yourself without damaging the precious layers of your skin.

damaged skin cells left are ready to be attacked by bacteria and turned into more zits.

some people bruise their face up and feel it constantly and cause themselves 5 times more spots by their bad habit.

after learning to care for them like an adult at the end of my adolescence, now many years after, here are some rules:

Rule 1 - you should never crush an acne with your blunt fingers if you can pierce it with a disinfected needle.

rule 2 - only pierce the zit when it is ready, after 4 days or a week of it appearing, when it has finished collecting itself into a pocket of pus. if you pierce a red bump before it is ripe, there will be nothing to evacuate, and it will likely make it bigger. dont spear a red lump if it may dissapear by istelf a week later!

Rule 3 - you should never pinch your face for anything else than slightly feeling an infected area and sensing it, in moderation, the more your touch or even damage your skin, the more spots you will have.

Method for Spearing : learn to calmly estimate exactly where the trapped pus is under your skin, and that you can feel it has fully formed. do not hurry, proceed calmly. sometimes you need to slowly stick the needle into yourself about 5mm until you feel it popping into a pus pocket, or else the needle with suddenly slacken as it hits some liquid.

usually you will only need to insert it 2 mm till you feel it is through.

pull the needle out and squeeze gently... sometimes the pustule needs to adapt the the drainage channel for an hour or a day before it all comes out without any pressure. some zits are tough and you are tempted to drain them too early, in which case you only hit a small pustule and it is more painful and damaging, but still much safer than squashing it, and it created a drainage channel which the last of the pus will come out of 5 days later.

if you eat chocolate, drink soft drinks, lots of processed white bread and stuff like that, it will cause grease and sugar imbalances in your blood that the microbes live on. try experimenting with very healthy foods if you have a bad problem.

...

after a year i became very good at operating pustules and i never had bruised skin any more. i still use a needle nowadays about once every couple of months for a pustule. i understood how and when to empty them so they healed as cleanly as possible.

and 2 years after, it had vanished. i still had a big hard round ball of fat in my cheek at 26 somewhere where my skin had malfunctioned when in my teens. i took a razor blade, cut a very clean line on top of the ball of fat, and out popped a hard white round thing about 4 millemeters in diameter. that was like the final chapter on my zit problems.