Thyme better than benzoyl peroxide against acne

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Thyme (Thymus vulgaris), a perennial herbaceous plant from the Lamiaceae family that grows up to approximately 40 cm tall [1] and is used nowadays as a flavoring agent of the Mediterranean diet.

Thyme was used by the Greeks in their baths and by the Egyptians who more than 2000 years ago used it to embalm their faraons and ancestors, probably due to the amount of antimicrobial active constituents found on Thyme essential oils, its most documented property and a quality that shares with other essential oils as for example lavender essential oil [2], both of them active against multi-drug resistant clinical strains of Escherichia coli bacteria [3,4].

Recently, researchers from Leeds Metropolitan University, driven by these known antibacterial properties of Thyme, tested the effects of this herb, marigold and myrrh tinctures on Propionibacterium acnes, the bacterium that causes acne by infecting skin pores and forming the well-known spots so characteristic from this bacterial infection. The results were published in a news release in the Society for General Microbiology website and are quite encouraging while not surprising. Image left: Wild thyme (NH) by David Short under Creative Commons license (CC BY 2.0).

THYMUS VULGARIS

Family: Lamiaceae
Genus: Thymus
Common name: Thyme.