my doctor prescribed me epiduo three days ago and it works like magic! i have mild/moderate acne, which really flared up a year ago (age 15) and it's been difficult trying to keep it away. i get cysts and nodules. there would be 3-5 in one area which can be painful. i don't get a lot of spots but i do get larger pimples. my acne is hormonal so i never know what it will do next. sometimes it goes down completely and one day i'll wake up with 2 cysts on my cheeks. i've tried doxycycline which didn't work for me at all. 2 and a half months in and i was still getting cysts frequently. i thought it would work because i was taking the fight inside out but it was a big fail. i was hesitant to try the epiduo as it is a topical treatment and i've heard many times that it is inside that you need to take care of (to control the hormones), hence taking prescription pills. personally i have had no bad side effects, it would VERY slightly itch/tingle on the side at a small area but goes right away. i haven't had any burning sensations, as i've read many people experienced on here at the first couple of weeks, but i'll have to wait and see. i saw a big difference the morning after my first night with it on and it has completely removed my cysts and nodules since, at least on the surface. i've also seen scars fading a little but i'm not sure if it is the epiduo. in the morning i would rinse it off with just water and use the olay complete spf 15 moisture lotion. my skin hasn't purged, i'm not sure if it will or if i'll get minor side effects later. i have only been on it for three days so i'll have to check back on here in two-three months. hopefully, i won't have to take pills with the epiduo or be disappointed yet again :)

epiduo dries out pimples and if you breakout epiduo is there to save the day. However after using this epiduo for months and months and years and years relying on it, it irritated my skin and made specific places where i applied the epiduo very red, sensitive and irritated (maybe because i did not apply a pea size amount). HOWEVER, i still think this is one of the best topical pimple treatments out there, and definitely by far the best one ive tried out of duac, clindamycin toner, etc.

I've been on epiduo for 4 weeks now and I have had moderate acne for about a year, when it started i didn't really see much of a difference it got a little better. At week 3-4 I have started experiencing the purge stage on my chin and it is pretty rough, but everywhere else has no acne just fading scars. Just got to stick it out. Hopefully it will be done purging in a couple weeks. During this purging stage I have probably had about 5 new pimples a day on my chin. I will post again at 8 weeks and then at 12 weeks. Thinking long term helps a lot and getting the epiduo app as well.

My daughter was on antibiotics for 9 months for Lyme disease treatment. When she went off the medication she broke out terribly on her face and her back. Long term antibiotics wreck your gut which among other things can cause acne. She started treatment with epiduo forte on her face but in a way that minimized the harsh effects. She already has dry sensitive skin so she applied it every other night mixed in with her moisterizer and worked up to full strength slowly. At the same time we healed her gut with probiotics - pills and kombucha and bone broth every day ( yes bone broth, google bone broth and healing acne) it has been a few months now and she is pretty much all cleared up. The marks have faded considerably and improve every day. Her back is completely clear.

If you're reading this you might wanna know whether Epiduo is effective or not, right? Lemme first give you a background on my acne, I started suffering from it when I was in highschool then it got worse until this year. I tried every way possible to cure it, from regular facial, chemical peel, iontophoresis to taking isotretinoin(which is the generic name for Accutance), they did treat my acne but only for a while. Then I came back to my dermatologists and he recommended me Epiduo, I'm like you who's skeptical on trying it because it 'might' not help again BUT when I read all the positive reviews on Epiduo here in acne.org I've decided why don't I give this a try. So for 14 weeks now I've been applying this wonder, my face is 90% clear with acne marks though. Together with Epiduo, I wash my face with Cetaphil and cold guava tea, then rub banana peel 3x a day for 30 minutes and serum. For those of you who's on the verge of giving up on this product please don't, be patient and positive. 😊

I have been using Epiduo for about 6 months now and WOW, the results are so encouraging! The first 1-2 months of using this acne treatment was not easy; my face would get swollen because it still had to get used to the Adapalene and Benzoyl Peroxide, I was breaking out more than I ever have and my skin was so So sensitive. The burning sensations I felt were so painful I honestly just had to lay there and wait for it to pass. I thought about stopping the treatment many times, but I have to say; I'm very grateful my dermatologist encouraged me to keep on track with it. I rarely get any pimples, before my pimples were mainly in my chin and forehead area. I will get the occasional one, maybe 1 every â…" weeks, but the Epiduo clears it up within 3 days. When I was using Epiduo for the first 4 months, I would apply my face cream after 15 minutes, but now I have realised that putting on a face cream over the Epiduo didn't do me any justice. It only made things worse, and it wasn't the face cream. Now, I simply wash my face using a very gentle electrical face brush and the recommended Cetaphil acne wash and then apply one pump of Epiduo to my whole face. Hopefully my skin will only get better than it is now! I also found it helpful to get the app that tracks your skin progress! The most important thing is to PERSEVERE and oh, STAY OUT OF THE SUN and LATHER ON THAT SPF 50!! I hope I've helped xxx

I am so grateful for this product. I suffered from moderate and cystic acne for around 2 years before seeing a dermatologist that presecribed me Epiduo in combination with antibiotics. My acne was completely gone 1 month later. After 2 months I got off the antibiotics but my skin is still clear - all thanks to Epiduo! However, I should mention that the first week of Epiduo was hell. My skin was flaky, lots of irritation etc. My solution to this was to use a Cetaphil cleanser + moisturizer before applying Epiduo. This combination helped me a lot and my skin irritation stopped. Nevertheless, I am now suffering from really oily skin due to my Epiduo treatment. This clearly bums me out but with the help of certain makeup and oil absorbing powders (transparent powder) I have managed to control this. It's an irritating side effect but with 100% clear skin - I can deal with a bit of oil.

This is the only product that worked as well as accutane did for me. I've been using it for 2 years. There seems to be a lot of people giving up on Epiduo/Tactuo/Tactupump way too soon. You guys gotta push through the first month of stingy/raw/sunburned feeling skin. Just Use it at night before going to bed..... then MOISTURIZE during the day.

I had moderate to severe acne and now six months later after starting epiduo ALL my spots are gone and I haven't had a breakout in a very long time. It has also helped clear my scarring and evened my skin texture. If you try epiduo my one piece of advice is you HAVE to stick with it. All the low reviews I have read are people who have not kept using it because they broke out more or it stung. It is an extremely strong gel that your skin will take some time to get used to (for me about a month). It does dry your skin out and make it very sensitive and scaly and flakey, but if you really want to get rid fo your acne those symptoms do not last a long time and soon they go taking your acne with them. It is a very harsh experience because you are peeling away the outer layers of your skin so the treatment can work deeply and therefore promoting cell turnover and fresh skin (without scarring!). Warning you do breakout very badly the first month but that is epiduos way of pushing ALL your spots out , that were forming, at once that would have just come out at different time intervals.

I am a 30-year-old female with a family history of adult acne (particularly in the 30's). My skin is not dry or oily, it's middle-of-the-road. Here is my acne history: Absolutely nothing through my teenage years. A couple spots here and there in college, but nothing terrible or even very memorable (I just have pictures of the random, very small spot), and I mostly attribute it to bitter cold and humidity in Indiana. Lived in San Diego for three years after college and my skin loved all of the sunshine and perfect humidity level. Then we moved to Colorado. Here's my recent treatment history: My face immediately hated the dryness here, but my worst breakouts were still around my period. When my husband and I got engaged, I went to see a dermatologist so that maybe I wouldn't have to worry about something happening on my wedding day. I am an athlete, and at my first appointment the doctor told me (exact quote) that, "Athletes are just dirty," because I sweat all day and don't wash my face enough. False. I have been an athlete all my life. I should have walked out of his office right then, but I had never been to a dermatologist before and really had no idea what to expect. He prescribed Doryx 100mg (doxycycline) in about January, and then I went down to 50mg approximately May. Everything went great, we got married at the end of September with zero blemishes, and I had planned to stop taking the medicine after the wedding (they're antibiotics, after all). I weaned off of the pills as the doctor had described, and a few months later, my skin freaked out. At first they were fairly minor breakouts, but all the time. Then I developed cystic acne, concentrated either on my chin or forehead (I've always been a T-zone person), and sometimes both. WEEKS of enormous painful bumps that just would NOT come to a head. I tried hot compresses to bring the nastiness to the surface and sometimes that worked, but mostly I just had to go excavating, which was awful and painful and an even more embarrassing healing process afterward. My husband's grandfather had a habit of asking me what had happened (to my chin/forehead) in group settings at family parties. Totally mortifying, especially when I had thought I'd done a decent job of covering up to leave the safety of my house. I went back to the same dermatologist pretty quickly, and he prescribed Doryx again, this time in a 200mg/day dosage. I didn't know to be wary of that, but my first exposure to sun of any kind that year (in Austin in March/April) was very painful and resulted in rashes on my hands and nose because of my increased photosensitivity on the medication. As for treating my acne, it worked to get rid of most of the cystic stuff, but I continued to have regular, sometimes bad breakouts. While they were preferable to what I'd been going through, the sunburns were very painful and seemingly unavoidable. I'm outside all the time. When I called the dermatologist to ask what I could do to prevent the sunburns I was getting, they told me to wear sunscreen. Like I hadn't been wearing the strongest stuff I could find. Fast forward to the next winter...I had continued taking the strong dosage of Doryx because the original doctor hadn't told me to do otherwise, and was not in the habit of having his patients come for check-up appointments. My acne gets worse in the winter because it's even more dry here, and by early March I was just so incredibly done being embarrassed to get within arm's reach of anybody, for fear of them getting a good look at my face. My conversations were short and clipped and I felt disconnected from everyone around me (save my incredibly supportive husband and parents) because I just never wanted to leave my house. I decided to go see a new dermatologist. She was WONDERFUL. So supportive and communicative, and positive about my future. She prescribed minocycline, 80mg (Solodyn is the brand), and Epiduo. I had tried topicals with the old dermatologist but he never told me how to use them, so I had always spot-treated with terrible results. The new, best dermatologist ever told me to spread one pump over my face every night, otherwise the medicine would be too strong. I did exactly as instructed (starting at the end of April), and didn't even notice super dryness or itching at first, because I've always moisturized fairly heavily at night (again, Colorado). After a while though, my skin got a little red and burned when I put moisturizer on: I use Cetaphil cleanser and was using Cetaphil moisturizer at the recommendation of others on this website. When the burning started though, I searched for something creamier and a bit heavier, and found Jason Age Renewal Vitamin E moisturizing cream. I buy it at Walgreens (comes in a little tub), and it has been perfect for me with the Epiduo. My skin did not completely clear up until about the beginning of September (about four months of religious minocycline and Epiduo usage). I experienced terrible purges at about five weeks and eight weeks, as a lot of other people have said. They were awful. Awful, and like no other breakout I'd ever had. Mine were concentrated right around my chin/mouth, and while the breakouts weren't as painful as the cystic acne I used to have, the healing process was very ugly with all of the peeling and impossibility of covering it up. After about ten weeks though, the breakouts I had seemed to be hormonal (around my period), and were much smaller and more manageable than before I started using the medicine. And while healing from the purges was terrible, I truly found that my skin turned over much faster on Epiduo than it ever did before taking it: It still sucked to cover up healing skin, but that process lasted a much shorter time than it used to when I had to do the same thing for cysts or other breakouts. Then, mid-August, I healed from a breakout, and haven't had what I would consider one since. I had regular check-ups with the new, awesome dermatologist throughout the summer, and when I went back at the end of September, she wanted me to wean off of the minocycline and just be on the Epiduo. I was pretty scared, but I did it, had one fairly major pimple (just one) right at the end of the weaning process, and have been perfectly clear since. The scars that formed around my mouth during the purges fade every single day, as do the other scars around my forehead and chin areas. If I use a lighter moisturizer with the Epiduo, I still get a burning sensation, so I continue to use the heavier cream that I mentioned before. Long story short, I am THRILLED with this product. The husband and I went on a tropical vacation at the beginning of December, and not only did I show most of my skin all of the time, but we were in the water constantly (no makeup possible), and I couldn't have felt more confident. I kept thinking how different that vacation would have been if I'd still been on a high doxycycline dosage and not on Epiduo, and it made the week even more enjoyable to know that I've found something that works for me. LOVE it. 100% worth the hard times!!!!! Hope this helps. Honest-but-positive reviews got me through my darkest days during the purges, so I wanted to contribute my own and give my full story. I'm a huge believer!!