Can You Really Use Baking Soda for Acne? Here’s What I Found Out

You have a half-empty box of baking soda stashed somewhere in the kitchen, don’t you? It could be sitting dormant in the pantry just waiting to be scraped into chocolate chip cookie dough, lurking underneath the sink as part of your homemade cleaning supply, or both. It’s cheap, convenient, and something that almost everybody has on the premises. But the thing is that baking soda can do a lot, but one place where I do not recommend throwing it around quite so liberally namely, your face.

Previously, I've seen many of the skin care "hacks" of the past, and baking soda masks or blemish treatments for pimples come back repeatedly. As an editor who spends the day product-test-driving and consulting dermatologists, I needed a final answer. Does baking soda treat pimples—or do more problems than it solve? So I tried and tested this myself to get all the answers.

What is Baking Soda?

Sodium bicarbonate, aka baking soda, is indeed a base with alkalinizing properties. That alkali character makes it effective at neutralizing acidic substances which is good to have in the oven and even within the body—but on the skin, that is where it can be troublesome.

Skin specialists point out that just because baking soda is inexpensive and can be found in everything from do-it-yourself deodorants to toothpaste doesn't mean that it can be used anywhere. True, it can exfoliate, soothe insect bites, and act as a substitute for dry shampoo temporarily. But on the face, and certainly on blemish-prone skin, it must be treated very gently.

Where Baking Soda Can Help With Acne

Baking soda isn’t completely undeserving of the buzz. As chance would have it, there do exist some positive reasons people have grabbed it in the bathrooms for decades. The grainy texture of the baking soda literally works like a micro-exfoliator to scrub away dead skin cells. Think of the situations where your skin has been dry and congested—after a long day of heavy makeup, e.g., or when pores have been particularly clogged. That gentle exfoliation can give you a smoother base and delay blackheads or whiteheads temporarily.

It’s also anti-inflammatory by nature. If you ever put it on a bug bite to ease the itch, then you’ve personally experienced that phenomenon firsthand. That very property can also dispel the redness of an annoyed breakout, if temporarily. And if you have the oiler skin type, the alkaline nature of baking soda can balance things out. Imagine that T-zone always radiating that mid-day glow—baking soda can temporarily put the lid on that oily feeling by neutralizing skin acidity that’s excessive.

The Risks You Can’t Ignore

It’s where the glow begins to fade. Baking soda has a pH of approximately 9, and your skin is happiest between 4 and 6. That’s a pretty high jump, and the difference counts. You can dry out your skin by taking it too far into the alkali zone, and it will cease to retain moisture the way it should. And that’s where dryness comes—tightness after washing your face, flakiness that can’t be addressed with moisturizer no matter how many times you apply it, or redness that makes the gentlest product sting.

Skin specialists also warn that frequently undermining your skin barrier leaves you more vulnerable in the long run. Think early fine lines, more frequent breakouts, or a skin tone that just never quite looks peaceful. It’s like stripping paint off a wall over and over; the underlying wall will eventually get worse. A quick do-it-yourself fix might be tempting in the short term, but the long-term trend is to do damage much harder to reverse.

How to Treat Acne with Baking Soda Safely (If You Insist)

If you’re still curious and would like to give it a shot, there is a non-crazy way of doing it. The safest of the three options is simply spot treatment by itself— NEVER a face mask on the entire face. For example, if you wake up with one stubborn pimple in front of some special day, whipping up a small quantity of baking soda (two teaspoons with a pinch of water) into a paste and leaving it directly on the blemish for 5–10 minutes might depuff the redness. That, of course, is something you do on a rare basis, not once weekly as a regular skin care routine.

Also keep in mind that the more oily the skin, the greater the likelihood of tolerance. If the skin is dry or sensitive, possibly the user notices flaking on the nose or cheek vicinity, possibly the face will react almost instantaneously to new members of the product rotation—this isn’t doable. And regardless of skin type, followup with a good moisturizer and SPF is called for, by virtue of the greater susceptibility of the skin thereafter.

If redness surfaces—irritation that lingers, stinging, peeling—it’s time to stop. At that point, it will be better that you visit with your dermatologist than reaching once more into the pantry.

My Takeaway

As far as I've studied and experimented with ingredients throughout the years, the fact is this one: baking soda is a wonder worker within your pantry, but within your face? It will do more harm than good. It can exfoliate and be anti-inflammatory when it comes down to it, but the downsides, especially on the skin barrier, far exceed the benefits. For long-lasting answers to acne? You can do better than that with much safer, dermatologist-approved ingredients. Bottom line? Baking soda can remain with your cleaning supply and cookies, not with your everyday skin care routine.