Consider Demodex: How I fixed my skin
About four years ago I started getting rosacea like red blotches on my face, mostly on the side facing the pillow when I slept. I saw a dermatologist who tested me for allergens, and then more or less gave up. I ended up having to fix it myself, and here is how it happened.
I did my own research and thought it likely that I had a Demodex mite infestation on my face, with the mites multiplying way too much. It is accepted knowledge that most people have these mites, but it is more controversial to believe that it causes issues for some people, for whatever reason, when these mites get too numerous.
So why did these skin mites suddenly cause issues for me around age 28, when they had not done so before?
Factors that caused this in order of importance, or maybe probably mostly number 1 is relevant:
I was really bad at washing/changing my pillow. Once I started having issues on one side of my face, I stupidly tried to changing the side I was sleeping on, instead of getting a new pillow and changing it more often. This quickly caused my other side of my face to start having issues as well.
Eating way too much seed oils may also have contributed negatively to my immune system health, as I started getting infections in the side of my mouth, that I had to daily treat with creme. This stopped when I changed my diet to an evolution based approach (as much as possible eat stuff that people 1000, or 10k, or 100k years ago ate).
Fixing these things were likely necessary before I could get better, and goes a long way to explain why my facial skin got messed up. And if I didn’t fix it then, it could have gotten way worse.
What worked for me was treating it with zz creme (not affiliated with them or any other product mentioned here), a chinese product specifically developed to kill these facial mites. I needed to apply it for several months, as you can apparently only kill the mites on the surface, and not when they are burrowed. After a month or so applying it every morning and evening, my skin started to get better. A creme containing ivermectin may also help.
My skin is good today, though I still have the mites, but in much smaller number. Only issue is that I need to often apply stuff to keep the mites down, or my face start getting scratchy, and then start getting red blotches again. So I basically need to keep the mites down, which my immune system can’t do for some reason.
To keep them down I do the following:
Change my pillow sheets at least once a week.
Change pillows once a week, rotating them in and out of the freezer (probably 72+ hours in to make sure mites are dead, but I often leave them longer).
Use ivermectin creme a couple times a week (I use Soolantra 10mg/g creme).
Or/and use a cleanser a couple times a week, to clear dead skin/oils/fats? etc off your face that the mites feed on. (I use CeraVe SA smoothing cleanser).
Or/and use Hypochlorous Acid (HOCl) spray, which like the other solutions seems to relieve itching, and thus probably kills mites. I use one from Briotech.
If it gets bad again and these don’t help I would go back to applying ZZ creme for a while, that is some rough stuff that seems to kill them off effectively.
Things I haven’t done yet but could consider:
Get a microscope and do samples from your skin extracted with say tape, to monitor how many mites you have.
I hope this is helpful if someone has a similar issue and stumbles upon this. Let me know if you have any questions.