Many acne sufferers don't want to pay a dime to treat their acne; even I was looking into home-made remedies when I was too cheap to go and purchase a real acne treatment. Although most home remedies just don't work to permanently treat acne (they may initially treat acne), there are some positive outcomes a few certain home remedies can provide to the skin.
But, before we move on, it's important to know that the majority of home remedies are skin irritants! I remember reading about someone recommending the use of toothpaste. Toothpaste may help to treat an individual pimple by drying it out, but wait till the pimple disappears. Toothpaste is extremely harmful to the skin, so you are essentially trading acne free skin for damaged, painfully ugly skin. Which one is worse? Acids and bases both damage the skin if used in incorrect proportions. Skin pH is a very important part to maintaining acne free skin, so do not use the old grand mom treatments some people like to promote.
Now, for our first cure. How many professional surfers do you see out there with loads of acne? Close to none. After looking into why they don't have acne, we figured it out: sea water has salt. Sea salt effectively dries out the pimples without damaging the skin. Sea salt isn't equivalent to table salt - in fact applying table salt, or NaCl to the skin is extremely harmful. You need to purchase authentic sea salt from a pet shop, and soak the face with this salt for as long as you feel necessary. This should help treat acne, however a good acne cream is recommended alongside this treatment.
The above cure is really the only known acne cure that doesn't cause additional breakouts and works effectively. Other cures include applying cucumbers to acne, aloe versa juice, eating many fruits and vegetables, honey, and cinnamon. These natural ingredients are definitely good for the skin, but for the treatment of acne, these homemade cures are very questionable. Many people recommend applying lemon juice to the skin, but based on my three week trial of applying mass amounts of lemon juice to my face in the past (I had a lemon tree so I had an excess of lemons), it did absolutely nothing except further scar my face.
If you want to keep your face acne scar free, then the best choice is to avoid homemade acne treatments completely. They are very risky and harmful to the skin even if they work. Every so often you can use them, but over use of fast acne spot treatments isn't advised, unless you don't care about scarring. Overall, homemade remedies work, but they don't work very well and often contain harmful skin irritants.