The Realities of a Medical Skin Fast

Hey guys!

I wanted to create a bit of a new start to an ongoing blog series that focuses on my quest to move from skincare that you topically apply to your face and body, and work on what is causing the issues to actually appear in the first place. I’ve been hoping to improve my skin over time and I find that my method so far has been trial and error, with a lot of abrasive of invasive types of treatment. I should start by saying, for anyone new to my blog my most popular content I’ve put out there were acne and skincare focused videos, the best ones I’ve done are not my most popular. You can check them out from here, I recommend looking into the eczema and acne interviews as opposed to the coverage tutorials. I am a very diligent researcher and have used myself as a guinea pig so I know my stuff, they’re some of my favorite blogs and full of information about skincare concerns.

So what do I use? I use different creams every single week of my life. I lost any kind of mystique or appreciation for commercial skincare products after learning how to put the formulations together, as most things are very basic components that just come from different quality of sources. I don’t fall in love with the new marketing Clinique comes out with, but I love a product that caters to my needs. My routine has been, clean the skin of dirt, debris, and gunk. Protect the skin from pollutants and sun damage. Drink water as much as I can. Notice hormonal changes in my body. Keep healthy. Treat concerns like individual things, not as a continuous rule for my whole skincare.

I did an essay on the biological function of the skin when I was studying the MSc I took at LCF, so when you kinda break down what the skin actually does, you see it as a system of processes. When you add extra shit to it, you often disrupt the process. So what I think has happened is that there has been a movement to buy package skin care products, from marketing geniuses who want to sell the full range. So you get the sensitive skincare kit or the oily skincare kit and feel that you must have every element of that system to see a result. It is obviously a silly idea because you are making a decision to treat something that completely changes by the hour.

You need to let your skin heal, let your skin self hydrate, let your skin breathe. Then treat the issues as you grow. Issues being, when you have an infection in the pore either by a physical build-up of oil, a caught up hair follicle, a build-up of bacteria or the things that happen from gravity and environment. This stuff will always happen when your hormones are out of wack, that could be stress, your body growing, your body aging and anything you eat that provokes a change. So all of that, to me is what makes someone's skin great and some people have a lucky combo of tolerance to foods, balanced hormonal changes or whatever. It’s not because someone uses great skincare and someone else doesn't do that, at all.

For me, I’m in my twenties and I have an imbalanced hormonal system where everything has been completely unpredictable. So I’ve had hair grow later than anticipated for a quote-unquote man, my beard came when I was in my mid-twenties in a full explosive overgrowth and it’s just been an impossible situation. The majority of my hair is white blonde, aka impossible to treat via conventional lasers. The rest is extremely thick brown hair that is resistant to laser and extremely abrasive during everyday growth. I have a form of folliculitis that is common in olive and afro skin types, which also means that when I scar my skin goes dark. That’s on my body, my face and it is hard to treat. Simply shaving my hair in the most sophisticated and hygienic ways, results in the regrowth, getting caught under the skin and causing an irritated follicle. So I have to treat my skin with something that keeps the bacterial levels at minimal, that resurfaces the skin by speeding up the rate of desquamation, this means shedding aka descaling, and that’s to keep up with the rate of my hair growth.

Retinols are the way that people do this, it’s vitamin A in a form, I won’t go into full details but it helps reduce textural imperfections and issues that cause ‘blockages’ by speeding the process up. I use a product called Epiduo which also contains benzoyl peroxide which is an oxidant, it kills bacterias good and bad and it’s not the best thing for your skin as it disrupts your natural processes of hydration and healing to some degree. But this is the only treatment out of a myriad that’s been effective at keeping 95% of the inflammation at bay. I use a range of different over the counter retinol, these aren’t strong and I don’t recommend mixing them. They are a medication over a certain percentage and must be prescribed by doctors.

So you’re probably gonna ask a bit more about laser? Well, I am infuriated with the topic and discussing it but I’ll go into it a bit more. What really changed was probably the most unexpected scenario for me because I have naturally very light and fair blonde hair and my beard which I was happy with, it is like a regular amount of blonde hair. However, now it has twice as much black coarse hair that is the texture of like apple stems. You know the like inflexibility of a stem? I have those growing out of my face in all reality. I’d say about 30 in a full beard despite three years of laser. And as they are growing every single one is inflamed and it’s been a nightmare to do any kind of hair removal in successive days of work because I can’t repeat shave. It just doesn’t work for me and I can’t deal with the pigmentation that comes in my skin from electrolysis. One thing that I didn’t know about until last year, is that when you want to encourage hair growth, you can use a lower level laser and instead of cauterizing the root, what it actually does is the same as when you use a skin peel. You burn something to encourage it to heal? Well, a low-level laser shocks the follicle into kicking out more energy to recover, and the hair grows back stronger. So subsequent treatments have caused my beard to disappear, I’ve then tried different lasers which have not been the right strength and then throughout the seasonal regrowth to come back in full force. It’s very enduring.

So back to the fast. I clean, protect, and treat the folliculitis with the undesirable Epiduo. Yes, I’ve seen a huge smoothing quality to my overall skin but I have never had visible pores in my cheeks, and I’ve never had dry areas or expressive lines in my forehead and eyes, and during the two years of using this, I’ve noticed both areas are more exaggerated. That’s my primary concern. I have received way more compliments in my skin despite these issues, I think it’s been an effective treatment with downsides, but I don’t want to continually treat the symptoms I want to get to the core. So my idea was to remove these medicated elements and try and keep it natural to see what other options could work.

So my experiment has been to stop using this gel and to maintain just a clean skin routine that involves natural remedies and water to remove dirt, keep my skin hydrated if needed and protected. For a week, let’s see what happens. I should also underline, no oral medications. My doctor recommended that she wants to try me on lymecycline, a low-level antibiotic specifically for inflammation in the skin as well as the other things that happen when you take an antibiotic. She also advised me to try hydrocortisone on spot blemishes which is such a stupid thing to recommend, because it can thin the skin and it’s not healthy. So I was dubious but I want to give you guys a proper analysis.

Update after a week. I hate my life.

Every area of that dark hair came out with an inflamed follicle and I really don’t know what to do about it because it’s such a task when it comes to shaving the hair, and I have so much work going on that requires me to be in glam mode at the moment. But we shall proceed onto the next chapter of the skin diaries and I will let you know what’s next. I am thinking the best thing to do would be to catch up with my topical treatment of epiduo and use some proactive healing agents in my skin to make everything speed up and I’ll keep you heifers posted. Wish me luck.

Update after two months. The lymecycline was not effective, had to revert to alternative laser treatments and epiduo. Joy.