Acne and similar skin disorders are immensely distressing, and arguably worrying about it can make matters even worse.

I suffered in my youth and prayed for adulthood as I felt confident that such problems would very likely then abate.

Whilst it's true that the level of severity later reduced unfortunately the problem stayed with me into my 60s! Somewhat perplexing as I had eaten a healthy vegan diet for nearly all my life.

Over-active pores were not the end of the matter as, late in life, I also encountered patches of extremely dry skin. So irritating in fact that I seriously considered scraping my skin off in the hope that it would grow back healthy. (Not recommended).

Increasing my fruit and vegetable intake and reducing fats certainly helped but not enough.

My distressed peaked one day (the day I wanted to rip off my skin) and at that moment I heard a voice (but not audibly) very clearly saying 'Tomatoes, you need tomato juice!'

I quickly covered my immensely itchy skin in tomato ketchup. Relief at last!

As an emergency action it worked a hundred times better than all G.P. supplied creams.

After one week of regular application I switched to far less messy tomato juice (from supermarket cartons) and also used such as a skin cleanser for the very greasy skin areas particularly around my nose and the face area. I also started eating a significant amount of tomatoes.

The tomato juice treatment worked for both dry skin and oily skin conditions and within a matter of days massively reduced the size of large pores around and on my nose.

G.P. medicines were binned and after fifty years of problems everything is now 97% better.