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Your rosacea, or redface is really a genetic susceptibility to the blood vessels on the face overreacting to surrounding heat, or for example, hot coffee, or hot soup, or alcohol where alcohol makes your blood vessels want to release heat and dilate. So it's genetic. It's worsened by sun exposure over time so that's why more adults get it over time. It involves as little as just background facial redness and flushing, but it can be as bad as lots of big red bumps and big pustules, and when it gets to the more severe stage, we have an antibiotic to treat that as well.

We try to treat it in the lesser stages where we can do it with our laser devices, but we treat based on our expertise as board certified dermatologists to get the maximum benefit for a patient. I did want to mention some of the new anti-redness topicals that are just coming onto the market. There is one called Mirvaso and that was just released, and in the FDA studies, it looked like a very effective topical to reduce redness and in fact, when you look at the pictures of the patients that were in the study, they go from being rosy-cheeked to being very, very pale looking, so it would be quite a dramatic transition.

There's another drug right now that is being in clinical trials, and that the FDA will probably clear sometime in the next year or two, and that's based almost like a Visine, gets the red out of the eyes, a similar compound will be able to get the red out of the skin. So dermatologists are definitely the doctors that will have first access to this in terms of samples and first knowledge of it in terms of prescribing to their patients.

What is Rosacea?

Doctor Robert A. Weiss explains what Rosacea is, and what factors can cause it to become more severe.