Hello I am brand new on here and need help as well. I would like to think I am pretty bright but for the life of me I cant figure out how to create my own post... so if anyone is reading again I just created my profile in desperate search and need of some answers for my skin.

I have done extensive research over the years and it has ultimately led me to this site. I am mixed raced (black&white) female 29 years old who has battled with acne scarring for over 10 years. I took two rounds of accutane at 19 and waited a year and got several sessions of Fraxel Restore by a much trusted old school doctor who did a really good job and got my skin looking good. He took all the precautionary steps with me having a Fitzpatrick 4 type skin and I was forever greatful.

However fast forward a couple years later and it had seemed as if all my scars came back with a vengeance or maybe I just formed new ones or a combination of the two. I went back to that doctor and he did his magic again only for me to realize that my skin was not responding anymore to the fraxel restore. It was almost as if my skin started to plateau with that modality.

So I ended up going to Jason Emer in Beverly Hills in 2017 and he was far from what I had expected. He tries really hard to convince the scarred and suffering that hes one of the only few to truly be a an expert and pioneer and true advocate for the acne scarred community but when I seen him I was proposed a thousand different treatments and all of them are more expensive then any other place I have ever been, visited, or inquired about. I get that sometimes you pay for the experience of the doctor which is why I was willing to shell out $6,000 in one treatment visit with him not to mention my driving and traveling costs coming from Northern Ca. I felt very pushed into all of the treatments by his front desk people who know little to nothing about dermatology and who you can tell are just taught and trained to sell sell sell. Ultimately I was very upset and not happy with the treatments done. To the point where I reached out to him but clearly he was too busy to get back to me personally so he had his desk staff reach out to me. I had expressed that I felt that my scars looked worse and my facial volume was looking more hollow. The treatments done were bellafill, sculptra, intensif, Tca cross, and one pass of some laser I think erbium. My skin did not look good and I was very depressed about it and his response was that I needed more treatments basically for the rest of my life to see improvement. However completely skipping over the fact that I think my skin was thinning out from everything combined I had done to it over the years and was now looking like slight volume loss after the treatments he had done.

Now fast forward to today I have a scheduled appointment with Dr. Rullan next week in San Diego for subcision. He really is going to be my last effort to try and help my skin. I feel like giving up but its just too hard to accept to try and live with my skin looking this bad for the rest of my life. It has truely changed and has caused me to be fixated on this 24/7. Mentally it has taken a huge toll. After sending my pictures to Dr. Rullans office I was told I may even need a phenol peel to get rid of all my scarring. That scares beyond belief because I have read much research supporting the fact that phenol is not good for ethnic skin. Is this true? Ive also read that once you get phenol you can never go out in the sun again. I went to an esthetician a year ago and a got a couple Tca peels and my skin absolutely hated it. It was a low percentage I want to say %8-12 but my skin and scars still looked way way worse after the fact. It gave my rolling scars an even more rippled and wavy look to the skin then before. So if my skin couldnt even tolerate Tca wouldnt that mean it wouldnt tolerate Phenol?

Again, I think that my biggest skin issues as of now are the scarring of course. Which consists of rolling atropic box car scars. Also slight volume loss. And very strange and irregular scarring from all the mentioned treatments above. I even tried skin pen treatment one time two months ago and it created very odd irregular lines, craters, and more volume loss under one eye that are still here! It was so drastic of a change in my skin that the clinic agreed and refunded me. Is it possible for the skin to reject treatments or to be so thinned out that it doesnt respond to what normally should help ones face improve? Im so sorry for This long post but I am trying to be as thorough as possible about my history and issues and hopefully receive some good feedback by the community well as the moderators. Any help is truely welcomed.