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I get extremely cyclical, inflamed acne on my cheeks about every two weeks. Within a 3 day period, I'll break out in about 15 pimples that are mostly on my cheeks, and extremely large and red and inflamed. The breakouts linger for about a week, then I have a few days with no break outs, and just as I'm starting to work on healing all the scars, the next outbreak happens. I call these time periods "explosions". It's awful to go from having hope that things are looking up to having a face covered in acne over a period of 48 hours. So far, I haven't found any topical treatments that help me at all, it seems like nothing I do will prevent a pimple or stop one in its tracks. I'm also on birth control and minocycline but of course these did nothing to help. Are there any treatments that anyone with similar acne has found helped them, or am I looking at something that can only be fixed internally? Any suggestions would be fantastic!
Hi there -
I occasionally get a breakout that sounds very much like this. I'll have a very deep, very inflamed cyst on my cheek that doesn't come to a head and no matter how much icing I do or attempts at decreasing it in size, it usually just goes away on its own in a week or so, leaving a bit of a dark mark - a terrible routine, but it's happened about a half a dozen times so far. However, the last one I did have, I had unbelievable success at getting it to come to a head by switching between using a warm compress and then an aspirin mask. I would have heat on it for 5-8 minutes and as I did so, crush up about 5 aspirin tablets and mix with just enough water to make a paste. After the heat, I applied the aspirin mask to the area for about 10 minutes. It can be a bit time consuming (I was in the bathroom for over an hour with this one) but amazingly after 3 rotations of this, the swelling had declined significantly and a head was visible. I've done the same thing for cystic acne on my forehead and have had similar results.
Good luck!