My daughter and I eat a clean wholefoods diet. We take vitamins and minerals in healthy amounts. Yet the weirdest thing has been happening to us the past few weeks. Both of us have got little spots that look like small pimples. They don't have heads like pimples though; instead the heads are small, white and dry.

My daughter has them on her cheeks and upper arms. I stopped all of her supplements apart from fish oil and vitamin C, to eliminate any candidates, but it hasn't made any difference. She eats the way she's always eaten: largely a Paleolithic diet, like me, but she gets porridge in the morning. She hasn't been eating any new foods.

My spots have appeared on the fronts of my thighs and nowhere else. At first I thought it must have been due to cleaning chemicals I'd used when scrubbing the kitchen floor; maybe they'd got through my trousers onto my legs. But they've persisted. I haven't eaten anything new myself and in fact my diet has been particularly clean over the past 6 weeks or so.

I can't think of any kind of chemical exposure we've encountered. It's life as usual really. The only other possibility is that I've stopped using laundry liquid and switched to soapnuts -- but those are natural berries with saponins in them and are supposed to be good for people with eczema and allergies -- they're not supposed to cause allergies. And if our bodies were reacting, surely it wouldn't be just in one or two places but all over-?

I'm very frustrated because whenever I Google this, I just find stuff about how pimples are related to bad diet -- refined sugar and carbohydrates and all that, and also how they can be caused by hormones. My daughter is 6 so that's not an issue. We aren't to my knowledge exposed to phyto-estrogens and we don't eat unfermented soy.

Any ideas are welcome, thanks! This is upsetting.