If blackheads are what fans want, then clearly, it's blackheads they'll get. In a new Instagram video posted on Tuesday afternoon, dermatologist Dr. Sandra Lee, MD—aka, Dr. Pimple Popper—posted yet another blackhead extraction video.
"Nothing like some #blackheads with some patient backstory," Dr. Lee wrote in the caption.
That's putting it mildly. What would normally make for a pretty straightforward—perhaps even underwhelming, by the doc's usual standards—extraction video is underscored by some truly remarkable, rapid-fire patient backstory.
(Rather than recap all of it here, I'll just say that it's worth just listening for yourself. In mere seconds, they manage to cover such a wide swath of family drama that this man's next appointment should with the producers of This Is Us.)
Now, back to the procedure: After slicing into a particularly juicy blackhead—on the patient's back, it appears—Dr. Lee pokes and prods and squeezes it into submission, before moving on to a couple of less problematic targets. Blackheads, as the video makes painfully clear, are "small dark lesions...that are a feature of mild acne," according to Medical News Today. They're also a type of comedo—short for comedone, which is what you get when pores are clogged dead skin cells and sebum. (Hence the name of Dr. Lee's favorite tool.)
If you've ever been a teenager, you probably know a thing or two about treating what's known as comedonal acne by now. It's also surprisingly common in adults: In fact, over 40 percent of guys in their twenties experience acne, according to a study from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. If you're one of them, and you're curious why it's still happening, we've got a few potential answers.
