Adult Acne Treated With Tazorac 0.05 Gel

Starting in July 2017, my acne begin to get increasingly worse. In December, it was bad enough that I was embarrassed to leave the house. My provider gave me the option to do either Accutane for the fourth time since highschool, antibiotics, birth control, a drug called spironolactone, or a topical. I am pretty terrified of oral medications at this point in my life, so I left with Tazorac gel to use. I started off using it twice per week as recommended. It did make my face very red and peel like crazy. The purging stage began about two weeks in and my acne looked significantly worse. Once the peeling slowed down, I used it three times per week, and when it stopped for the most part, I bumped it up to every other day - my face can't tolerate using it everyday even now, 4 months later. It took about 8 weeks for the purging to slow down to the point that my face looked like it did before starting the Tazorac. I began to buffer the Tazorac with my facial lotion, and also use about half the amount of Tazorac recommended on the label, to decrease irritation. I also started washing my face only once a day and using a biome friendly facial cleanser and probiotic spray (MotherDirt brand). Because my acne is hormonally related, I also took steps to balance my hormones, including really cleaning up my diet, adding Probiotic foods and drinks, eating many servings of vegetables each day, and drinking around four cups of spearmint tea everyday to lower testosterone (which is a big culprit of hormonal acne!!). I had also been on bioidentical progesterone to manage horrible PMS, and I stopped taking that around week 12 and noticed an almost immediate difference. It tends to be two steps forward and one step back, but at this point I am almost completely clear and extremely happy with the progress. I have lots of scars but my provider assures me that the Tazorac will take care of those. There are a few small indented scars that I am hoping will also even out. Will update in a month or two with more pictures.

Skin continues to improve!

Skin has been like this for a while now. Pic makes it look a bit better than it is, bc you cant see the unevenness from minor rolling scars. Planning to do microneedling with PRP and IPL treatments for redness/hyperpigmentation and uneven texture and rolling scars. I wish I had been a bit more careful to prevent scarring or explored other options for treating acne that would have reduced my chance for scarring. All in all, tazorac is super powerful but you have to be SO careful with the amount you apply and frequency- I went finally went down to 2 x per week to keep irritation at bay.