I am a 26 year old 120lb female and I live in Canada. I had cystic acne for 13 years that got worse as I was ovulating every month. It appeared to be hormonal acne. My skin and hair were also exceptionally greasy. When I wore makeup it would slide off after a few hours. My nose would look like someone put butter on it. My pores were large and wide open because of all the grease. I would have 4-5 cysts at a time with a nose full of black and white heads, and little bumps along my temples, cheeks, mouth and jaw line. My acne changed a lot over 13 years (when I was a teen I had a lot on my forehead and mostly clear everywhere else), however what remained the same was that is was always there. I never noticed if it would improve in the summer, but looking back on photos, I did have slightly better skin during sunny months.
The main, noticeable effect that Vitamin D3 has on my skin is that it dries it out and reduces the oil on my skin. The first two weeks that I took it, my skin started peeling a lot. I loved it. The peeling made my hyperpigmentation go away faster and if there was a small bump, it would peel right off, rather than growing into a big infected cyst. Within those first two weeks I stopped having new breakouts. After about a month, the peeling slowed down, but my skin stayed clear. I now have clear skin, as long as I keep up my vitamin D intake. My hair is also not uncontrollably greasy anymore. I can wash it every 2 days now, where I used to have to wash it 1-2 times per day and it always looked terribly greasy before washes.
I take Vitamin D3 to prevent my skin from getting oily, which prevents me from having acne. I had to play around with the dosage a little bit because if I take too much, my skin gets too dry (especially my eyelids). If I dont take enough, my skin gets oily and I break out. Its actually a very fine balance for me. I also have to take into account that my skin is much oilier between the end of my period and the time I ovulate, so during that time, I take more Vitamin D3. I take 7000 IU of Vitamin D3 during my oily time of the month and I take 5000IU- 6000IU during my less greasy time of the month. I tried taking between 8000IU-10 000IU and that made my eye lids so dry they started flaking, no amount of moisturizer or vaseline could fix it. So 7000IU is my personal upper limit. At one point I had a doctor scare me that I was taking too much Vitamin D (doctors have a much lower daily recommendation than the Vitamin D Council) so I bumped my dosage down to 3000IU. After about 3-4 days of this lower amount I got two very large new pimples on my cheek. As you can imagine, I went back up to my old dosage after that. I have since gotten Vitamin D blood tests with my doctor which showed I had normal levels of Vitamin D in my blood.
I told my doctor about my discovery and he said "Who knew!?". I guess not many people do know about this, and the information on the internet is very limited so I decided to start a blog about my story with resources to help other people who want to learn more about vitamin D for acne. Maybe it will be useful to someone here.
*Mod edit* - No external links.
Oh wow, thanks for the info. Good to know. I cut out milk because of acne and I don't expose my skin to the sun often because of peels, so my vitamin D must be pathetically low.
Anyone else have good results with this? You look great Anna.
Thank you! I haven't noticed a big effect on my skin by removing dairy from my diet.
Vitamin D is essential for health. It's actually not a vitamin, it's a hormone. But low levels of vitamin D has been proven to increase cardiovascular risk and breast cancer risk. More health issues are suspected from low vitamin D but not enough evidence has been gathered yet. So it's good to take whether it cures acne or not, especially since a lot of this forum is probably more conscious of their skin and avoiding the sun.
Are you taking vitamin D just by itself? Is it combined with anything else? Have you changed anything else besides taking vitamin D?
Vitamin D itself cured my acne. If I stop taking it for a few days, the oil comes back just the way it used to.
I do take it with Vitamin K2. I do it for this reason: Vitamin D3 increases the calcium in your blood, and Vitamin K2 takes the calcium from your blood and tells it to go into your bones. If you take Vitamin D3 without taking Vitamin K2 you might start getting calcium building up in your arteries which can be dangerous.
Previous to Vitamin D I tried many things. Topicals, like African Black Soap. It never cured my acne, but it did make the rest of my skin nicer and I still use it. I changed my diet several times. When I was a vegetarian my acne was at it's worst, but I don't know if it's because I was a vegetarian. I did the Paleo diet before I started taking Vitamin D. It made me feel healthier, but I still had cystic acne all the time. Now (with my Vitamin D) I still eat Paleo most of the time. Although over the holidays I fell of the Paleo wagon completely for about a month and my skin didn't breakout.
I tried taking Magnesium because I was told that taking Vitamin D3 uses up your magnesium stores. I took about 300mg for two days when my skin started to get oily again. I didn't connect it to the Magnesium so I kept taking it. I took it for 4 more days and actually had a huge breakout. Fortunately I made the connection, and as soon I stopped taking it, my skin stopped being oily.
There are actually scientific studies that show strong evidence that Vitamin D can cure acne. They just don't get studied further, because Vitamin D does not promise a lot of profit. You can get it for free from the sun. I have a ton of information on my Vitamin D for Acne wordpress blog. I can't post external links here, but you can PM me if you would like to read more about it.
I think Vitamin D deficiency causes acne because of the way Vitamin D is produced. Your skin needs to interact with the sun to produce Vitamin D. You skin produces an oily cholesterol substance that sits on top of your skin and waits for UV rays to hit it. Then UV rays hit the cholesterol molecules and cleave the molecules into Vitamin D hormones. These Vitamin D molecules then get reabsorbed by your skin. If you have a deficiency, your skin will keep producing this oily cholesterol in an attempt to produce Vitamin D. Then you have too much oil on your face, it clogs your pores and you have acne.
Here are some quotes from studies about using Vitamin D for acne.
VITAMIN D IN THE TREATMENT OF ACNE
CHARLES A. SIMPSON, M.D.; FRANCIS A. ELLIS, M.D.; HAYDEN KIRBY-SMITH, M.D.
"Doktorsky and Platt2 reported improvement in 100 per cent of 35 patients with acne after a months treatment with 2,500 to 5,000 U. S. P. units of vitamin D daily. There was 75 to 80 per cent improvement in 90 per cent of the cases, but in 10 per cent relapses occurred within ten days after the treatment was stopped. Maynard3 also expressed optimism"
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Vitamin D in Acne A comparison with X ray treatment
By AIERLIN T.-R. MAYNARD, M.D..
Of the 132 acne patients he studied, 28% were much better at three months. 47% were healed at three months.
I believe I may say that at no time in my dermatological experience have I felt such complete satisfaction with a treatment as I have with the cases of this series. I know that vitamin D is an imperfect weapon to slay this disfiguring disease, but it undoubtedly gives one a feeling of being well defended. From the patients viewpoint, it has left little to be desired, as they find themselves improving, both in appearance and in general well-being. Many have expressed the sentiment, Never felt better.
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VITAMIN D IN THE TREATMENT OF ACNE VULGARIS
Abraham Doktorsky, B.S.; S. S. Platt, B.S.
Full article available only to subscribers.
"We ourselves were our first patients, since both of us have this condition. We started with a dosage of 10 drops a day of Meads viosterol in oil 250 D and increased this during a period of two weeks to 20 drops a day. After continuing for a period of one month we observed by actual count of pustules a decrease of about 75 or 80 per cent. We considered these results satisfactory enough to warrant experimentation on a larger number of subjects."
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Preliminary evidence for vitamin D deficiency in nodulocystic acne
Arzu Karatas Togral & Mustafa Turgut Yildizgoren*
"The patients with nodulocystic acne had relatively low serum vitamin D levels compared with the subjects in the control group. The findings from this study suggest that there is a connection between low vitamin D levels and acne. Larger epidemiologic studies are needed to confirm the status of vitamin D levels in patients with acne."
Just wanted to update everyone and say I have been taking Vitamin D for 7 months now and have consistently clear skin. I tried to wean myself off of it by lowering my dosage by a third and my acne returned within 2-6ish days the few times I tried to do this. I have to keep taking high amounts of Vitamin D long term if I want to maintain my clear skin.
When did you first start seeing a difference in your skin once you started taking the Vit D?
I started seeing a difference within the first week. My skin immediately started getting drier and started peeling.
where you buy your vitamin? Did you apply it to your entire skin
I've used all sorts of brands. Almost all of them work the same, except one time when I bought discounted gel caps. So now I don't use gel caps, only hard pills.
It makes perfect sense considering Vitamin D is classified as a seco-steroid. (Yes, you read that correctly. The Vitamin D group is technically a steroid and steroids function as hormones within the human body.)
Just a little thought, but vitamin D wasn't directly responsible for the alleviation of acne symptoms, but rather greatly improved the facilitation of associated vitamins and minerals that are dependent on it's presence for effective absorption in our G.I tract. (Notable compounds would be zinc, calcium, magnesium, and iron.) [1] A lot of people believe you can give yourself adequate amounts of Vitamin D from UVB exposure inducing the vitamin's synthesis mediated by cholesterol, but I personally feel it's exaggerated a bit considering the presence of a negative-feedback loop mechanism involved with it's production to nullify the possibility of toxicity via overproduction. [2] Nevertheless, that is just my personal opinion and there is well defined research that completely disproves that ideology.
Furthermore, you can take into consideration it's employed mechanics, along with other micronutrients, increasing activity of our Biopterin-dependant aromatic amino acid hydroxylase and it's benefits for improving the inherent reduction in enzymatic cofactor expressions relating to genetic diseases. [3]
I know there is various vitamers belonging to the vitamin D family, but I'm hardly versed on their respective differentiation or their individualized role in maintaining proper biological functions. I'd have to take some time to read the benefits associated with each.
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3908963/
[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2698590/
[3] http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/75/4/616.full