Ethereal music plays over a close up of two fingers wrapped in white latex gloves, pinching skin together as a ball of yellow pus squeezes out of a pore and is scraped away onto a napkin with a thin needle. The 39 minute video, titled “Oddly Satisfying Acne and Blackhead Removal On The Face With Relaxing Sleep Music” has over 91 thousand views after being published on YouTube for two days. This traction is nowhere near the 24 million views that several of Dr. Sandra Lee’s videos boast.
“It was all because of Dr. Pimple Popper,” college student Jessica Park recalls as she thinks back to when she first began watching pimple popping videos. “I saw her on YouTube, Facebook, and now I’m so obsessed with the feeling I get when I watch her videos.”
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Many credit their questionable obsession with watching pimples being popped to Dr. Sandra Lee, more famously known as Dr. Pimple Popper. Boasting 4.5 million subscribers on YouTube and 2.9 million Instagram followers, the Los Angeles based dermatologist first began posting videos of her patients getting their pimples and cysts extracted in 2010. Even coining the term for people who enjoy pimple popping- “popaholics”- Lee now has her own television show on TLC, which premiered in January 2018. The show features Lee performing extractions but also informing the patients and viewers about the proper treatments for various skin conditions.
“The grosser the better! I get so much enjoyment out of it,” Lene Curtis said, the head esthetician at the Face Haus facial bar in downtown Los Angeles.“And it’s putting more out there, educating people by saying like ‘this is cystic acne, you have to go to another dermatologist or a surgeon to take care of that, or if you have smaller ones you can go to an esthetician.”
Although watching pimples being popped on a TV screen may seem bizarre, broadcasting medical procedures has long been a popular trend. The 1960’s saw a surge in medical shows like Dr. Kildare, which followed a dramatic relationship between a medical intern and his surgeon mentor. Although similar record setting programs like ER, Doctors, Casualty, and Grey’s Anatomy all focused less on the medical procedures and more on the relationships between patients, doctors and the medical world, they were huge hits and marked the beginning of the world’s fascination with medicine on screen.
In the early 2000’s there was a surge in medical shows that actually showed procedures, so that the viewer saw in gory detail the incisions, reshaping and stitching that transformed patients. (see Infographic 1/Digital Element 1).
*“Insert quote by Mary Murphy (who worked on Nip/Tuck) about the popularity of medical shows after interview”
The scientific reason for why people find watching Dr. Pimple Popper enjoyable may be similar to the reason shows like the Golden Globe winning drama Nip/Tuck have been so popular.
“Negative sensations are interesting, particularly when you’re in a context where they can’t hurt you,” writes psychologist Nina Strohminger in a dissertation about The Hedonics of Disgust. “You’re probably not going to step in dog shit just for the experience, but maybe you’d click on a link to watch someone else doing it.”
Seeing Dr. Pimple Popper cut a massive incision in a cyst to drain it is undoubtedly enough to make anyone lose their breakfast, but the fact that viewers can watch something horrifying without actually having it happen to them is where the thrill factor lies.Plus, dopamine and disgust play a role in why people find the videos so soothing.
“It may release a bit of dopamine, and that makes you feel good so you will just keep picking and picking,” dermatologist David Woodley said, who has been practicing since 1982 and who works at the USC Keck School of Medicine. First there’s anxiety induced by having the pimple, then a calming and pleasant sensation after it is popped and the contents disappears. Someone might find themselves going to pop one pimple only to find themselves going for a single blemish on their face, as the continual release of dopamine, the feel-good hormone, helps to develop an almost obsessive picking habit.
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In the bookYuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgustauthor Daniel Kelly describes that because we rarely see truly horrifying things up close in today’s world we frequently we seek out disgust- from a safe distance. He also suggests that the reason why some people find these videos soothing and some find them repulsive depends on a person’s past experiences.
“The failure of any given individual to be disgusted does not reflect some moral superficiality; it reflects nothing more than she has been socialized differently from those who are disgusted,” clarified Kelly in his book, and a follow up interview with Salonmade clear that disgust isn’t always a bad thing.
“Instead of waiting until something gets into our system that we have to fight to push out, disgust helps us to stay away from objects and people that are likely to get us sick,” Kelly said.
A new phenomenon called the autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR, may also have something to do with these feelings of pleasure. Often called a “brain-gasm,” ASMR is a euphoric experience that results in a tingling sensation on the skin that moves through the body, beginning with the scalp and moving down the spine.
Most ASMR videos on the internet are of people whispering and eating foods or drinking loudly- imagine a close up of woman with big lips slowly smacking and crunching a cucumber loudly into a microphone- and although the science community has not yet validated ASMR, Dr. Pimple Popper claimsthat many of her fans are sure that pimple popping is simply another visual variation of it.
But Woodley cautions against popping pimples, especially at home.
“It’s gratifying to get something out, but often something else that can cause inflammation goes in and causes scarring,” Woodley said. “Then whatever inflammatory material goes deeper can cause more scarring, which is permanent.”
A visit to the dermatologist is warranted if a patient has an acne cyst, which can be treated with a small injection of Kenalog, a steroid that reduces the large inflammation that has built up.
But the dermatologist can also extract smaller lesions, like whiteheads or blackheads- the smaller bumps that we typically think of as “pimples”- which are formally called closed and open comedones, respectively. They do this extraction with a small metal tool called a comedone extractor that has loops on the end, which you position around a pimple and press down to extract.
If you’ve ever seen Dr. Pimple Poppers videos, you know that there are all sorts of different sized pimples and cysts that she treats; long yellow whiteheads that corkscrew out of the skin, huge round basketball sized cysts with grey liquid oozing out of them and small pebble sized blackheads. But despite looking drastically different, they all begin as a closed comedone or whitehead.
“The pilosebaceous orpheus, or the opening of the oil gland underneath a hair follicle, sometimes dilates and that causes an open comedone, or a blackhead,” explained Woodley. “So at first the patient sees a white dot or a whitehead, and that Orpheus of the pilosebaceous unit can dilate and get a black look, which means that debris is stuck the very top of the unit. These both can be readily extracted from a dermatologist without scarring, but many of those will go into an inflammatory papule if not treated, which become a cyst with pus in it.”
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Each pimple’s pop is different in the consistency of what’s extracted, how much comes out, and the color of the liquid. Since there are so many different kinds of pops, people typically have at least have one type of pop they do find repulsive.
“I mean lipomas, those ones I find gross- like actually gross- I don’t want to watch them because they are so big,” self-proclaimed popaholic Shaye Morrison said, referring to the bulging fatty lumps of pink flesh that Dr. Pimple Popper will occasionally extract from patients. “They look like raw chicken sometimes… like a tumor almost.”
But as college student Jess Park excitedly describes, popaholics also have a type of pop that they can’t watch enough videos of.
“I enjoy the pimple popping videos where it’s not so messy,” Park said. “All of a sudden a little balloon of pus will come out and then it’s over.”
Each condition needs a different type of treatment, and when it comes to the various types of treatments for acne, Curtis is an expert.
“We have peels, like the glycolic peel which helps to polish and goes deep and work from within,” Curtis explained as she motioned to a product on a shelf of treatments that Face Haus carries for customers to purchase. “Or there’s our facial oil which is antibacterial and anti-inflammatory. What I call liquid gold.”
The motto of Facial Haus, the facial bar Curtis works at, is “for the people”- they even offered complimentary facials to the local university for a month this fall- but many products and procedures are unaffordable and inaccessible to those who don’t have hundreds of dollars to spend on their skin every couple months. With ingredients like rose water, green apple stem cells, turmeric most of the magic serums at Face Haus cost upwards of $50.
Visits to the dermatologist are no cheaper, and although those with insurance have to pay a small co-pay to visit those without it will be asked to fork up at least $170 according to the online dermatology information site FirstDerm.
Not only are the products and visits unaffordable, but there simply aren’t enough dermatologists in the United States, with the average waiting timefor an in-person appointment with a dermatologist being 32 days. Woodley explains that this is because hospitals are the ones who fund doctor’s internships and residencies, and they won’t fund the residencies of doctors who won’t be able to frequently treat patients admitted in hospital.
“The way hospitals make money is by having patients being treated in hospital,” Woodley said. “Most of the time there aren’t many admissions for dermatology, so hospitals are reluctant to pay their salaries. Then there aren’t enough of them.”
Since working at the Keck School of Medicine, Woodley has convinced several local hospitals and medical centers to fund more dermatology residencies, although he admits that his dream of changing the system by having government funded residencies is far off. But he explains that there are at home solutions that may allow you to bypass the expensive dermatology visits and buying vegan stem cell infused antioxidant creams.
“Usually try topical therapy first- benzoyl peroxide or tretinoin- to open up the top of the pimple so that the contents come out, flowing easily onto the skin and not backing up into an inflammatory papule pustule or cyst. It’ll cost you nothing, and it’ll help, Woodley said. “You always want to start with the least invasive treatment anyways, and that means trying to hold off on the gratification you get when sticking your fingers into a pimple!”
Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHY
