Hi all! Thank you so much for creating this site! I haven’t been suffering with this for as long as many of you, but I’m grateful to find other people who are going through this too!
Mine started in July 2019. Just 1 gross, oozy, raw lesion near my chin that wouldn’t heal. I get pimples once in a while and I knew right away that this wasn’t a pimple. It came to a head fast, was itchy, and oozed the yellow liquid.
By mid-August I had a rash of white-ish bumps on the sides my chin (folliculitis?) and probably 10 raw, weeping sores across the lower part of my face. It was so gross and I went to a walk-in clinic. I’d recently been on 3 courses of antibiotics (unrelated to my face) and thought it was yeast. She diagnosed it as impetigo and gave me mupirocin.
I used it and it helped! Some of the really infected ones healed a bit, but it didn’t clear completely. And the folliculitis didn’t budge.
At this point, September-October, the folliculitis around my chin started developing into bigger lesions. One would get itchy and turn white. If I squeezed it (sorry, gross, I know) a solid, white coloured thing would come out and then it would heal. If I left them alone, they’d turn into brown marks that never went away. I also continued to get the single, big ones on my jaw, cheeks, beside my left eye, and one between my eyebrows (ugh!).
I finally saw a dermatologist in October. He said it was rosacea and gave me metrogel. I didn’t have the redness or flushing, or any of the other symptoms of rosacea, but I went with it and tried the metrogel.
It helped a bit. The folliculitis responded to it pretty well — I’d put it on at night and by morning there were fewer bumps. I put it on again in the AM, but by the end of the day they were all back again.
From October to January, I was using metrogel, acids (glycolic, salicylic, and lactic), mupirocin, and a LOT of benzoyl peroxide — I thought for a while maybe it was acne?! But none of it cleared my face.
Some other things I tried during that time:
- IPL: that helped a bit. My face cleared for a few days afterwards (I read later that IPL kills dermodex!).
- professional salicylic acid peel (20% strength): that also helped. I guess it must have killed them too — it certainly hurt enough to have killed them!
- tea tree oil 50/50 with sweet almond oil. It was way too irritating to continue and I didn’t see much improvement from it anyway
Finally, in early January 2020, I went back to the dermatologist. By that point I had convinced myself that it was demodex and I was hoping the doctor would give me something for it. I was sitting in the waiting room and I found this website! I read about ivermectin for the first time (thank you!) and went into the appointment hoping that he’d prescribe it — and he did!! I didn’t even have to ask for it. He said I had perioral dermatitis and to use it at night.
I started using it 5 days ago, along with metronidazole in elidel cream (in the AM and PM). I’m still in the die off stage, so my face looks pretty horrible — but the brown marks that have been there for months are HEALING!! I thought they would never go away. The folliculitis is also healing (well, purging, but no new ones are developing!). The weeping sores are closing up. I have 1 new big one on my chin, where it was always the worst, but overall I’m seeing a huge improvement! I am so glad to have found this medication and this website — thank you!
I’m including some pictures. I didn’t take many when it was very bad — I could barely look in a mirror. I used to have flawless skin (that I worked very hard on to achieve!). It’s been devastating going through this whole ordeal. I hope this is finally the end of it!
And back before all of this started (aka June 2019!)
. But hey, it’s better than being filled with oozing sores!
I am SO sick of this!
