Okay, so I was on 0.025 retin a cream for acne for a couple months and did not feel it was doing anything, so my doctor bumped me way up to the .1 percentage around a month ago.
The kind of acne I struggle with is the inflamed whiteheads kind (and each leaves a mark which takes ages to go away).
Anyway, so I have been on the .1 cream for 4 weeks now, and I have just been breaking out worse and worse recently, in more whiteheads than I started with. I am not sure if this is due to the clogging ingredient in the cream OR due to the fact that my skin is responding to the 0.1 percentage and I'm having the initial breakout.
I am considering switching to the gel. However, I have read the gel has alcohol in it...isn't this just as bad for skin? Is there a retin a gel that isn't in an alcohol base? Is the cream that bad in terms of clogging pores due to the isopropyl myristate? I'm really not sure what to do.
I have used both. All the different derms I have seen in the past have told me retina can take up to 6 months to work and it gets worse before it gets better. I am 36 years old and each time I move and through out the years a derm swears it works wonder and actually have read it has really helped some people sadly I was not so lucky and it never worked on me and I did give it 6 months. I know I switched to the gel and it felt a bit lighter, but so no improvement in my acne, but I truly believe what works for one person won't work for another so you gotta stay with it cream or gel for a while to see if it works for your skin. My most recent derm was very optimistic about me trying epiduo which is retina and benzoyl peroxide. I was excited too because benzoyl peroxide is the only thing that has help my skin through out the years other than accutane. Sadly the epiduo didn't do anything my derm told me that many patients had severe drying and he had many successful patients with amazing results and. I never got dry flaky skin and I noticed no change in my skin, but I did see on this site how many people have had great success, so just another one to try maybe. From my experience you gotta stick it out a while to see if it works which is really annoying going through the initial break out. Not sure if this was helpful. I hope it works for you like it has others!