My father has always had very rosy cheeks and a rosy nose, it was got progessively worse for the past few years and we just put it down to the fact he drinks alcohol regulary. Turns out he has been diagnosed with rosacea! He is now on a lt of creams and some sort of shampoo, I think nizoral.
Anyway, I flush very very easily. Eespcially when doing exercise, I look like a tomato, despite being fit as a fiddle and strong as a bull.
Anyway, my cheeks are very sensitive to allergns, like some cat or dog hair, if it touches my face all of a sudden I can feel that itchy sensation, when you brush it of I have like small welts on my face.
I have permanent redness on both cheeks, like beside your nose and under your eyes. Sort of like when people are warm, I am like this permanently but it isn't too bad. I didn't even consider roscesa as a friend of the family always had a red face and he had ever test under the sun done, dermatologists, cardioologists etc and they came to the conclusion that the blood vessels were simply closer to the surface of his skin that normal people, most peoples vessels being much deeper.
What treatments are there for my cheeks to reduce redness? I blush very very easily, all it takes is a few reps with a weightlifting bar and the blood travels to my face at a rapid rate.
cheers
Nizoral has no effect on rosacea. It sounds like your father is being treated for a malassezia-induced skin condition, which I have and my father had too.
Malassezia causes an extreme itchiness, with flaking skin, and flat red bumps in more extreme cases, and perhaps tinea versicolor, which looks like small giraffe spots. The key principle is that malassezia is lipid dependent, which means it must consume oil to live. When you sweat, the fungus starts feeding voraciously, and your immune system recognizes the fungal invader, and you have inflammation, which the first responder in the your immune system.
You could try Nizoral (1% or 2% ketoconazole shampoo and 2% cream, web only), or Hegor 150 shampoo (1.5% Climbazole, on eBay only), and Lotrimin Ultra (1% BUTENAFINE HYDROCHLORIDE, not Lotrimin AF, in any drug store). All these products are OTC and easily bought from the web.
You need to look at the process like doing a differential diagnosis on yourself. If you use Nizoral 1% shampoo for 3 to 4 days and go out into bright sunlight, and scratch your scalp, and see a small cloud of dandruff flakes, you have a good diagnosis for malassezia. Sometimes it's called seb derm or oily dandruff, rather than the dry dandruff that makes small flakes, because the skin flakes are very sticky and there's a lot of skin redness. The hyper sensitive skin you described is similar to my problem, before treatment, except I would say it felt like hundreds of ant bites.
Please read my .pdf that is a long review of all the OTC treatment options on this forum. It's my first post here. It took me 8 months to figure it out, and then 8 months of effective treatment to get well. It's an immune system problem but much more treatable than rosacea, unless you waste time and money using old time dandruff products like Selsun Blue or Head and Shoulders, like I did at first, which are useless against seb derm aka oily dandruff.
If it is true rosacea, the redness is caused by a combo of two things:
1) Broken capillaries / excess capillary growth
2) Constantly "activated" capillaries
To treat 1, you need laser treatments.
To treat 2, you need beta blocker medications.
The creams and such don't do a whole lot.
