Six Things I Emphasise in the Clinic

In the previous part I set out the basic principles you can find online or in books. So what is the practical guidance I particularly emphasise to patients in the clinic? Let me go through it one by one.

First, sunscreen.

To put the conclusion first: you need to use three to five times more sunscreen than you have been using.

The practical guidelines recommended medically are these.
Teaspoon rule — about a third to a quarter of a teaspoon for the whole face and neck.
Finger-tip unit — a strip squeezed along the last joint of the index finger (about 0.5 g) covers half a face.

Hearing it, you will feel it is far more than you expected. Most people apply a thin layer, but if you have rosacea you must make the effort to keep to this recommended amount to block UV irritation properly.

Reapplying every two hours during outdoor activity is just as important. A few days ago I stopped by Olive Young and saw that products combining sunscreen with moisturiser were among the bestsellers. Those are in fact the ideal form for patients with redness — they protect the barrier and block UV at the same time, and they are light enough to reapply repeatedly outdoors every two hours. If you are being treated for redness or worried about it, I recommend buying this kind of product and getting into the habit of reapplying often.

Second, sudden changes in temperature.

Facial redness commonly worsens in autumn and winter, when the cold wind starts. Coming from the cold outdoors into a warm room, or the reverse, makes the vessels dilate or constrict abruptly and the redness worsens. To avoid this, the practical tip I often give patients is to make a scarf part of winter life. Simply keeping the temperature around the neck and face steady removes a good part of the irritation caused by temperature gaps.

Beyond that, many athletes and keen sportspeople come to our clinic. Golf in particular combines long UV exposure with a sauna after the round, so it easily exposes you to a compound set of conditions that worsen redness. For treatment, avoiding the sauna is the right answer — but given the health benefits now attributed to Finnish-style saunas and the like, flatly forbidding it is not realistic either.

One of our patients, a professional golfer, had no choice but to go to the sauna with colleagues because of his work. Fortunately, with continued laser treatment the severe flushing after the sauna improved considerably, and he says he is no longer embarrassed and keeps up the laser treatment. Even so, in the clinic I can only keep telling him: "avoid the sauna as much as you possibly can."

Third, moisturiser.

Even when I explain in the clinic that "use plenty of moisturiser for your skin barrier — applying enough moisturiser alone has a powerful anti-inflammatory effect", few people actually apply it more than twice a day.

The practical guide I recommend is five or more times a day, in generous amounts. So how can you manage five times a day? I suggest this routine.

Right after morning cleansing
Around midday (one or two reapplications with a product that combines sunscreen and moisturiser)
Right after cleansing when you get home in the evening
During the rest period after dinner
Just before bed

Spread through the day like this, you can comfortably use moisturiser five or more times. Keeping just this habit can give you a redness improvement comparable to medication.

Fourth, indiscriminate use of functional or expensive cosmetics.

These products contain functional ingredients for brightening or wrinkle improvement and various additives, and surprisingly many of them can irritate skin already weakened by redness. Occasionally patients keep applying something because it was expensive, even though their skin turns red or reacts sensitively afterwards. However good the ingredients and however costly the product, if your skin reacts sensitively you must stop using it immediately.

Fifth, misuse of steroid ointment.

Steroid ointment calms inflammation strongly at first and can look highly effective, as though the redness has cleared completely. But used over a long period it causes vessel dilation and skin thinning (atrophy), so the vessels beneath the skin stand out more and ultimately the redness worsens far more severely. So please avoid using it freely without a physician's accurate diagnosis and prescription.

Sixth, and most important: enough sleep and relief from stress.

I doubt I need to labour the importance of sleep and stress management. But in actual clinical practice I very often meet patients whose redness improves considerably simply from changing their daily pattern, sleeping properly and controlling stress. Giving the skin time to repair itself and normalise vascular constriction matters as much as any treatment.

Next

In the next part I will cover the vascular laser programme we run at ReYeonK, along with what effect the currently popular skin booster treatments actually have on facial redness.

The cause of redness, the treatment direction, the number of sessions needed and the course of recovery differ with skin condition and vary from person to person. Please decide on diagnosis and treatment plan only after consulting a physician directly.