True or False: Facials are a waste of time and money

TRUE! With the world in lockdown, perhaps you are concerned about what will happen to your skin without your regular facials (if you ever got facials in the first place). Though relaxing and potentially enjoyable, from a skin benefit point of view, facials are totally pointless and potentially harmful for your skin in the long run (Please don’t shoot the messenger! References below). Here’s why:

- By ‘facial’ I mean a beauty treatment done at home or in a salon consisting of facial massage with creams, steaming of the massaged face with or without comedone extraction followed by application of a mask
- Khanna (2002) studied 142 women (aged 17-63) for 12 weeks after getting a standard facial. What they found was quite shocking:

- 33% developed an acneiform eruption 3-10 weeks after the facial, characterised by deep-seated nodules mainly on the cheeks along with closed comedones (basically – the facial gave them acne)⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

- 5% developed facial dermatitis 2-7 days after the facial & 4 of these patients were found to have patch test positive contact allergies to constituents of the products used in the facial

- No objective benefits or improvement in facial skin was found

- Why did the facial cause acne in these patients? Khanna (1999) studied this as well with biopsy studies:

- 37 patients with acneiform eruptions appearing on average 6.2 weeks post-facial were studied

- All had deep-seated nodules and scattered closed comedones on cheeks, with 18.9% also having them on the forehead and 24.3% on the chin

- Patients who got regular facials (every 3-6 weeks) had persistent presence of these specific lesions (so they were there all the time - constant acne)

- Biopsies of the nodules showed histology in keeping with the underlying cause for the acne being due to the massage of the skin causing either blockage of the pilosebaceous unit or their disruption (as opposed to the idea that the creams used during the facial are ‘comedogenic’).