Sunday, September 11, 2011

The Wayne Goss Method (IE - getting rid of cystic acne) - AN EXPERIMENT

THE EXPERIMENT
Try a different (and hopefully successful) acne solution.

THE LOGIC
I first heard about this “formula” through Wayne Goss (www.youtube.com/gossmakeupartist) – a well-respected makeup guru on YouTube. I won’t even begin to go into the story of how hard it is to get me to listen to a lot of the “gurus” and their makeup or skincare advice (being an esthetician, I have issues with a LOT of the information being thrown around out there), but suffice to say, Wayne has earned my respect and my willingness to try something he suggests.

THE HISTORY
For those that are unaware, I suffer from an incredibly painful condition called cystic acne. Unlike the normal breakouts most experience, this consists of “cysts” that are beneath the skin, horribly swollen and painful, and don’t seem to be affected by things like how often or what I use to wash my face, etc. While I do get the occasional normal “breakout” – usually a few days after being lazy and not washing my makeup off, and such, it is rare, and I tend to always have this other kind of acne instead.

Thankfully speaking, I do not suffer from this as badly as most who have the condition do. For me, my “blemishes” are localized mostly in the lower, outer portion of my face. Translation: always below my cheekbones, usually on the outer half of my cheeks, rarely on my forehead, some onto my chin, and most of it along my jawline (both just above and below the bone). Believe it or not, these cysts become so painfully swollen that there have been times where it becomes difficult to eat or even talk because it hurts to just breathe, nevermind MOVE.

I have tried just about everything under the sun to clear this, with mixed results. Proactive made it a thousand times worse, for instance (and before I get lectured on this probably being my skin “purging,” PLEASE keep in mind that I am a trained esthetician and I know that your skin has to cycle and therefore skin care can take 30-60 days to really show results one way or another).  We’ll just settle for saying that I have tried everything from chemical peels to toothpaste in an attempt to solve the problem and nothing ever fixed the issue.

THE “PLAN”
According to Wayne’s story, he finally gave up on trying on these different solutions and came up with one of his own:

In the morning, he would wash his face with an ultra mild cleanser (something like Cetaphil, for instance), then he would follow this with a heavy layer of a 2.5% benzoyl peroxide gel. He would then repeat this process in the evening, before bed.

The logic behind this process is that there is bacteria somehow trapped beneath the skin, deep enough that normal washing will in no way resolve the issue, and that it stays trapped deep in those under layers, continuing a problem that there is no simple solution for.

According to him, he started this process on a Tuesday evening. By Wednesday night, his face had started to get very, very dry, and “smiling would make his face feel like it was cracking” so he started trying moisturizers to help alleviate this tight feeling, with nothing seeming to work. Eventually, he opted for sunscreen due to how emollient (greasy) it is, to help it settle down. On the second and third day, his skin became very red (because of how incredibly irritated it was). By the fourth day, his skin was red and irritated, but the spots were “DRAMATICALLY different.” And, by Saturday morning, he claims to have had an 80% improvement in his acne. He says he had a complete clearing of the acne within two weeks (completely free of acne, although some scars remained, obviously).

Apparently, he did this for about four months, eventually cutting down on the amount of product he was using from a three-inch long strip of this gel every application to more like a half-inch strip. At this point, now that his acne is totally under control, he uses a gentle cleanser, a BHA liquid from Paula’s Choice (a UK store, perhaps?), and a pea-sized bit of the OXY Spot (the benzoyl peroxide gel) every 4 days.

MY PART IN THE STORY
Alright, so where do I come into this story? Well, I’ve decided to try his system. After all, worst case scenario, my skin will dry out a bit and I’ll stop using the stuff and I won’t have any improvement in my acne. Best case scenario? Maybe it will work…

One of the interesting side effects of benzoyl peroxide is that it is actually a bleaching agent, meaning that it will bleach your skin somewhat over time (it also means that if you are not careful to wash your hands REALLY well after applying it, it can bleach your hand towels and will SERIOUSLY burn your eyes if you rub them). The neat factor to this is that it will most likely help with the severity of the scarring. I exfoliate often enough that my scars do fade relatively quickly already, but it would really be nice to have them fade even faster. Especially if my skin were clear – it would be nice to be able to be without  makeup without looking like death warmed over.

So, here’s where we’re at – Friday, the 9th, I went to Walmart and bought the Equate Spot Treatment (it is a 10% benzoyl peroxide lotion that is the generic of the OXY Spot treatment). It was $1.94 or something, and is a minute amount (I think it’s like 0.36 oz or something), but I figured I’d see how I reacted before buying a big version and I didn’t have a huge amount of time to look for something else, as I only had like 20 minutes to shop before I had to grab my munchkins from school.

Day 1: Friday night, I washed my face with Cetaphil and applied a good coat of this to only my affected areas (no point in disinfecting what isn’t infected). Can’t say that I felt much of a reaction to the cream (ever used milk of magnesium as a primer? Then you know how it felt – just kind of dry, but nothing major).

Day 2: Saturday morning, I followed the same process, noticing that my skin felt MUCH tighter after applying the cream (similar to what you feel when you get a moderate sunburn and your skin is very dry but not painfully blistered or peeling). Recalling Wayne’s story of how painful his skin became, after about an hour, I went and put on my oil-free moisturizer (the Equate version of the Neutrogena Oil-Free Lotion), which took the feeling away. I washed and treated my face again before bed.

Day 3: It is now Sunday evening (so I washed and treated my face this morning and will be doing so again shortly). I actually applied a second layer of the spot treatment in the early afternoon, as I frankly wasn’t feeling much, again followed an hour or so later by moisturizer. I guess I was expecting my skin to be in serious trouble at this point – from his story, he was super miserable at this point (using 2.5%, and I am using 10%), with skin so dry as to only be alleviated with sunscreen – so when I am not anywhere near that, I guess I was thinking that maybe a third treatment couldn’t hurt.

THE RESULTS
 Today, my skin is very dry compared to normal. It’s actually very interesting, because my forehead (which I see no reason to treat as I never break out there) is the only part of my face not getting any treatment, and the rest is so dry that it makes my forehead feel super oily… Anyway, my skin is dry, but not overly so. Without the moisturizer, it would feel tight, but is not red or particularly irritated. I find it hard to imagine that my little moisturizer is doing so much when he was forced to use something as greasy as a sunscreen, so I am wondering if my product choice is as effective as his. In theory, the benzoyl peroxide should be creating a type of constant chemical peel effect – causing my skin to shed it’s top layer or two every single time, and if that were truly the case, I simply should be having MUCH more irritation than I am.

That said, I AM seeing results. As I said before, my skin has dried up quite a bit, even considering the moisturizer (which would normally leave me a greaseball a few hours later, when instead I am dry again a few hours later). I have also seen a number of my spots drop drastically in the swelling department, and most of the smaller ones actually come to a head. I do not seem to have any new spots, and the ones I do have are smaller, very dried out, and hardly painful at all. I did wear makeup successfully yesterday, so my skin is not overly irritated or sensitive, and it was much easier to conceal the spots as their redness has also gone down drastically.

THE OUTLOOK/MY PLAN
I am optimistic – obviously, it is doing something so the theory is sound. Whether or not it will solve things remains to be seen.

I am almost completely out of my stupid miniature bottle of generic spot treatment lotion, so I plan to spend some time at Walmart in the next few days trying to find an actual gel rather than a lotion, and one in a much bigger bottle so that I don’t need three of them to get through a week.

I also want to try to find a gel that is not so strong. He claims to have had this kind of result from a gel that is 2.5% BP, so I am certainly not going to slap four times that strength on my face without first seeing if my skin can handle it. My opinion thus far is that the combination of the BP being IN a lotion and the moisturizer I have been putting on have been somewhat shielding my skin, both a blessing and a curse, and something I want more control over. I should be having many more issues from such a high percentage than I am so far.

I have taken some BEFORE pictures, which I will post when I actually have an updated photo to show you – at this point, all the spots are still there, just much less swollen, which cannot be seen with a camera.

Let me know your response to all this – have you ever tried anything so extreme with your skin? What were the results?

For those who want a more in-depth explanation of this system, feel free to visit Wayne’s channel (just search his uploads for “acne” and it will pop right up), or visit acne.org, which has entire threads dedicated to this particular “recipe for success.”

No comments:

Post a Comment