Hi! I have created this post to share my experience with Epiduo for anyone who is currently undergoing treatment or is thinking about starting on Epiduo! Before I begin, let me tell you a bit about myself.

My acne history:
I am a 19 year old female who has extremely oily skin. Acne for me started a few months after I turned 16. As the years progressed, my acne exacerbated from mild to moderate. I had tried many OTC products to help initially, however none sufficed. My acne is cystic, I have scarring lesions and extremely congested skin. However, my acne is ONLY on my cheeks, the skin surrounding my cheeks are extremely healthy and not congested at all.

My acne journey (pre-epiduo):
As we all know, having acne can have us googling and researching all kinds of things to discover what causes our acne, what triggers break outs and what changes we can make to eliminate it. Through research I had discovered that my high glycemic diet (lots of processed food and sugars which raised my glucose levels) were a reason for my aggravated acne and causing breakouts. So I began a new diet of low GI foods and cut out all processed foods as humanly possible. My break outs were less severe however my acne still remained. My skin was still severely clogged and congested my break outs still persisted. The only thing really that changing my diet did was lower inflammation of my acne.

The second thing I tried doing was the whole "natural" regime. I quit chemicals and all facial cleansers on my skin for six months. I used honey, cinnamon, yoghurt, tumeric and basically any home remedies my hands could find. This was also during my change of diet, and once again nothing had changed. The only positive of the home remedies were lightening of acne scarring as most of my home made remedies had lemon.

However, my cystic acne remained.

My Epiduo Diagnosis:
After two years of trial and error, my skin cleared up 30% over the two years. Despite me being less stressed a bout the state of my skin, my skin was still extremely congested and clogged pores were evident. I had blackheads and multiple closed comedones. My dermatologist diagnosed me with moderate cystic acne with scarring.

My Epiduo Regime:
So as per my dermatologists request, I picked up Cetaphil in the GENTLE formulation, despite having oily skin I did not pick up the oily skin formulation as my dermatologist said my skin was going to take a beating. I also use Neutrogena combination skin moisturiser (was using it before my epiduo regime and it has never broken me out).

My routine is very simple, the first week of using epiduo I used it twice a week. Removed make up with micellar cleanser, used cetaphil, used epiduo on my face for twenty minutes and then applied moisturiser. Using epiduo sparingly is crucial and infrequnetly within the first month of using it is the most important thing to preserving your skin and not shocking the skin.
After the first month I began using it three times, then four times then eventually seven days a week.
My first week of using epiduo for seven days a week resulted in extreme flaking, sensitive and inflamed skin and yes - a purge. I am going to insert pictures within my next post and continue my story if you guys are interested...