Excessive facial sweating is devastating your life, but you have learned to live with it. When you are suffering from this condition and cannot figure out how to prevent sweating, you don’t have to imagine these scenarios:
Sweat stings your eyes, making contacts unbearable and causing a perpetual bloodshot look.
You can’t wear makeup because even the “waterproof” stuff runs.
You carry around a towel, a tissue, anything that will let you wipe the sweat off your face throughout the day. Sometimes you even give up and keep a bandana over your scalp or a towel wrapped around your neck so the sweat will be stopped there.
You hate going out to lunch, you make excuses for not going to the neighborhood barbeque, and you can’t bear to be up on stage or in front of a meeting.
No matter how alone you feel, you are not. If any of these symptoms describes you, you are among the millions of people worldwide who suffer from facial sweating.
What causes excessive facial sweating?
According to Elliot Sparks of Live Sweat-Free, the causes of excessive facial sweating (also known as facial hyperhidrosis) can be divided into three areas: environmental, physical, and genetic.
First, the most commonly considered causes of excessive sweating on the face are environmental.
You are in a hot room, or at least a room that feels hot to you but normal to others. Or maybe you are in a humid environment, by the beach, in the tropics, surrounded by moisture. There are very few ways to control the environment, except for maybe moving away from everything. If this describes you, then you’ve probably tucked yourself in cold rooms, avoided parties or outdoor events, and tried to lead a “normal” life with facial sweating. You know that other people just don’t understand.
Then there are the causes of excessive facial sweating that we can control.
When non-sufferers think of sweating, this is what they think of. They think you are doing it to yourself. You decide to go to the gym, and the intense workout makes the sweat flow. Or maybe just the opposite-maybe you are overweight, so the extra weight and extra exertion cause you to sweat more often. People who don’t suffer from excessive facial sweating think you can just stop going to the gym or turn up the air conditioning or get on a diet. They don’t realize that you were sweating in your car before you ever got to the gym, you always have the a/c cranked full-blast, and no matter how skinny you get, it won’t make a difference. We’ve stopped drinking hot coffee, refused to order soup, and tried yoga and meditation a time or two. Nothing seems to work.
And finally, we have the genetic causes of excessive sweating on the face.
These can be the most traumatizing because they are the least explainable. People just don’t understand why you sweat so much, no matter how little you are doing. You likely get frustrated with friends and embarrassed with strangers. Dr. Ray Sahelian estimates between 30% and 65% of patients suffering from excessive sweating have a family history of the condition. He says, “One part of the brain controls the sweating response to body temperature, while another area controls the sympathetic, or emotional sweating response. . . . The emotional component is in overdrive,
