Accutane Journal: Day 8
Today was my eighth day on Accutane. The dryness has really set in–my face is flaking all over and I used about as much lip balm today as I would over a 5-day period under normal circumstances. I noticed that my eyes got a little dry after a few hours working at the computer today; I may get some eye drops to help with this, especially since I do wear a contact lens (yes, only one!). I am still molting (two coats of moisturizer before my makeup this morning, and I was still pulling of little flakes of skin everytime I went to the bathroom today), but my acne is improving subtly. I still have it, and am still getting new pimples, but they just seem a bit less angry.
The big event today was that I got threaded. Threading is a method of hair removal that involves having a string twisted up and rubbed over your skin, effectively ripping the hairs out at the root. I usually get my upper lip and my chin threaded every few weeks (yes, I’m furry–my grandmother is Italian so I can’t help it!), but haven’t been in about six weeks because my skin has been particularly ornery lately. I had so many huge painful whiteheads for a while there that I just couldn’t imagine anything touching my face. Threading can be a bit irritating and painful under the best of circumstances–with a horrible acne breakout it’s unthinkable.
But since my skin has calmed down a bit over the past week, and I was starting to resemble an Hispanic male (I’m usually just a white girl) I decided to give the threading a try. And it hurt like a mother$(*%@^! You may or may not know that in addition to making your skin as dry as the Sahara, Accutane makes your skin really, really sensitive. Getting threaded today was definitely more painful than usual, and even now, several hours later, the skin on my upper lip is stinging a bit. I didn’t seem to turn any redder than usual, and the redness that I did get subsided in the usual amount of time. All in all, I’m happy to have shed my Hispanic male persona, if only temporarily…