A harsh lesson from Mother Nature

This weekend I got a very harsh lesson from mother nature herself. If you have been reading my posts lately you know that I love using avocado face masks! Honestly I love to use anything natural over something man made or chemically made. I like to use lemon in my hair to lighten it and to clarify it, I love coconut butter on my skin as a lotion and aloe vera straight from the leaf if I have a burn. In my mind the closer something is to nature the better. For the past few weeks I have had a minor skin blemish and I have had no clue what it was. I was hoping the avocado masks would help to heal it and although they did seem to help it still was not going away. On Friday night I was reading on the Internet that you can apply garlic to your skin to help clear up blemishes and I decided to give it a try. I crushed one clove of garlic and put it under a band aid and stuck it to my skin for around ten minutes. It had a burning sensation when I did this but I simply thought that meant it was working well. I left it on for about ten minutes and then decided to wash it off. After looking at it the blemish was still there but I figured at least I tried something new. When I woke up Saturday morning I had a big red circle on my face around the blemish (the circle was around the size of a dime). I figured it was irritated and that it would be gone by Sunday but when I woke up Sunday it was swollen and looked like a blister you would get from burning yourself. So, I went online and realized that quite a few people have tried putting garlic on their faces to help with acne and have had very similar results. There is a chemical in garlic (alicin) that actually can burn the skin and it is considered a second degree burn. I have been putting aloe vera on it, using neosporin and cucumbers to help cool it off. Right now I am wearing a band aid on it when in public and taking the bandaid off when I am at home. It is very noticeable and I am just doing my best to make sure it will heal and not get infected. I just want to let my readers know that I have learned the harsh lesson that just becuase something is natural it doesn't mean it is right for your body and it is still important to be careful and do a lot of research. This was a hard weekend for me and I am not excited about having this for my vacation in Mexico. Overall, I was just surprised that something I eat quite often could cause such horrible problems to my skin. I am trying to look at this incident as a gentle warning from mother nature and just to be aware and more careful in the future. I did read from quite a few people who left the garlic on for hours or over night and did it all over their entire faces and had burn scars and blisters all over their face. So, in this way I am lucky that I did not do that I suppose :-). I will be fine overall, it sucks right now but I will take it as something to learn and grow from and hopefully you guys can learn from my mistake as well :-).