Hey everyone,
My name is Lonnie and back in 2016 I incurred severe skin damage from the use of Retin A (only 12 uses), manual skin exfoliation via facial exercises and (possibly) Dermarolling. This is a long story so I will post it in sections as it's too long to let me post it all together. Also, I had to put it under skin rejuvenation. Okay, back to my story....I'm not certain dermarolling played a part in my damage. After using Retin A 12 times (and mind you I started out using skincueticals retinol and worked my way up slowly) I woke up one morning and noticed that I had developed some weird marks and dents in my forehead. Well being the anxious person that I am, I proceeded to exfoliate the area even more not realizing that I had over exfoliated my skin and that my skin barrier was basically in emergency mode. Fast forward a few weeks, and my skin started to burn as if I had just applied a chemical peel to it. My pores all turned into ice pick scars and had had a strange thickened look to my skin. However, when you felt it it actually felt thinned. My face was quite painful and an orangey red tone. Soon the ice pick pores started connected themselves into lines and weird shapes. My skin looked very crinkly and shiny and could not hold any moisture at all. Over those 6 years I tried so many different things to heal my skin from different oils, almost every barrier repair cream on the market, bio revitalization injections, low dose accutane, DMK masks and treatments, PRP, Dermaviduals, Psoria gold, etc etc. The dermatologists that I visited suggested that it was rosacea and so I tried 2 different rosacea creams which made my condition even worse.
This is a before photo taken in 2016 prior to Retin A and over exfoliation. The next photo is a close up of the orange peel skin damage.