Day 3 of My Moisturiser Withdrawal Experiment (photos)

I have been flaring so badly since the onset of the cold weather and my skin seems to have gotten to the point where nothing works on it anymore, so I decided at the weekend to give the moisturiser withdrawal another go, figuring I had nothing to lose.

Last time I tried it, I really hated it, but I have been reading lots of positive reports on blogs from ones who are having success with it, so I thought it only fair to give it another go in the name of science and experimentation!!!

One person who has been a massive inspiration to me has been Ruby. You can read her blog here. She recommends giving it a week, reminding her readers that day 2 and 3 are really hard and not to give up.

So I'm going to give it a week. I don't know what to expect, but i think a week is long enough to make an informed opinion on the subject.

They say don't knock it until you've tried it.

The one good thing about moisturiser withdrawal is that it doesn't cost anything to try. So why not try the one week challenge and see if it suits you?

Anyway. Here are my thoughts so far.

On day 1 my skin went super tight and I couldn't move my mouth very much (a blessing for my long suffering family!). The day was tough, but the redness did seem to subside and by the evening, I could move a bit better. HOWEVER. I had a terrible night and by the morning my skin was really bad again, which led to my ranty post yesterday.

On day 2, I woke up crying and feeling awful. Again, as the day went on, movement became easier. The hardest thing is not picking at the flaky skin. I am flaking everywhere, leaving little skin trails.

Now I am on day 3. The redness has gone down a LOT. The flaking is awful though, and I am not going out looking like this (school run unavoidable, sadly). I think the only way through moisturiser withdrawal is to hole oneself away for a week. The flaking is round my mouth and I have a lot of bleeding cracks. This morning, the movement seems better, which leads me to believe that maybe the new skin underneath is coming though. Some flakes have peeled off, but the skin underneath is raw and wet because I am in a flare.

Also, because I am in a flare, areas where I have NEVER moisturised are red and rashy, like my belly and thighs. Because of this, I don't think that moisturiser withdrawal is the be all and end all, or a cure to TSW. The backs of my ears, where I NEVER ever used any sort of moisturiser are still oozy. Go figure.

TSW is primarily a vascular condition, which means that there is a lot more going on that just the surface level of the skin. We flare because of the blood vessels dilating and I don't think that moisturiser withdrawal can help with that. However, on a surface level, there may be a lot to be said for leaving the skin well alone and not doing anything to irritate it, which is why I believe that this method may help me.

I've tried looking up and researching articles on the subject online, but for every Pubmed article that I find that is "anti-moisturiser", I find another that says the exact opposite. The problem is that I wonder whether the pro-moisturiser research may be skewed because it may be sponsored by pharmaceutical companies wishing to sell their products.

In short: I'm still on the fence about whether MW will personally help me or not, but I'm trying it out and recording my progress with photos so that readers can make their own mind up on the subject.

Here are today's photos:

Here is an extreme close up of the skin on the lower half of my face. You can see how flaky it is and the dark pink area at the top is an area where a large skin flake has peeled off to revel a wet, raw area underneath. Yuck. You can also clearly see that my skin is flaring underneath the flaky skin.

Redness down, flakes up. and no, I can't smile because I can't move my mouth! I may wear a mask on the school run later...