Another frequent question I get from DermTV viewers is: why does my skin stay red after it heals? Look, we all get minor injuries to our skin, cuts, scrapes, burns, even minor surgical injuries such as after I’ve taken a mole off. But probably the most common injury to your skin is probably an acne blemish. So, normally within a week or two, the scab is gone, the skin is healed, it’s nice and flat - but it’s pink and normally it will stay pink for maybe a week or two. But sometimes that goes on for many weeks or even months and that’s really annoying, especially on your face where you’ve had pimples because you don’t want that redness to be visible. So, what’s going on here, why is this happening? Anytime the skin is injured, obviously it needs to repair itself and to do that it needs to bring additional nutrients in to make the new cells that repair the skin and to take away the debris. Well, how do you get those additional nutrients in? By widening the supply lines. The supply lines are the blood vessels. They may start out like this but then they enlarge like that to bring so much more supplies and nutrients in. Additional blood means the skin is redder and so you see this redness and it persists. When the repair is finished, the supply lines, the blood vessels, should shrink back down so the redness goes away. But you know something? Those blood vessels often are verklempt and they don’t know they’re supposed to get smaller and they remain enlarged. The extra blood that they bring isn’t harmful but it’s annoying to see the redness. So what can you do to get rid of that extra redness that persists? The easiest way at home is just to do it with compresses, especially milk and water compresses. The milk has protein which is very soothing for the healing skin and the compresses work by evaporation. The evaporation causes a cooling of the skin and anytime the skin cools it constricts those blood vessels to hide the blood and the skin gets less red. Another way to do it is to buy an over the counter cortisone cream. 1% hydrocortisone has a chemical that actively constricts those blood vessels and decreases the redness. And if neither of those are helping, you can always see your dermatologist who can remove the extra enlarged blood vessels with a laser. One more way to take care of it: why not just cover it or camouflage it with foundation? If you’re going to do that, try to get a foundation that has a green tint in it because green is opposite to red on the color wheel and it camouflages and hides it immediately.
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