The advice starts at home, and that's the problem
Your mother means well. That's the first thing to understand, and also the thing that makes this harder to say. When you came home from school with a cluster of pimples across your forehead, she handed you besan mixed with haldi and told you to leave it on for twenty minutes. Her mother did the same for her. It worked, sort of, in the way that anything mildly abrasive applied with enough optimism eventually fades. What she didn't know, what nobody told her, is that a fourteen-year-old's skin is not the same organ as an adult's. Adolescent skin is thinner, more reactive, and in the middle of a hormonal negotiation it didn't ask to be part of. Scrubbing it with gram flour every other day doesn't calm that negotiation. It inflames it.
