r/skinseoul

Skin is oily, moisturiser adds oil, therefore skip it. The logic is clean and the premise is wrong, because most of what a moisturiser does is deliver water and then stop it leaving.

Oily and dehydrated at the same time is extremely common. Sebum is lipid, hydration is water, and having plenty of one tells you nothing about the other. Skip the moisturiser and barrier function drops, water loss goes up, and skin compensates the only way it can, with more sebum. The shine you were avoiding gets worse over a few weeks and now every active stings.

Gel or water-cream texture, glycerin high in the list, and skip the heavy butters if you're congestion-prone. Isntree's Hyaluronic Acid Aqua Gel Cream and Anua's Heartleaf 77 Hyaluron Soothing Lotion both do it without a heavy finish, and there are a dozen equivalents.

The argument that usually lands isn't the biochemistry. If skipping worked, you'd have less oil by now.

Pimple patches do exactly what they claim, as long as they're on the right spot. The disappointment comes from all the other spots.

Hydrocolloid is a wound dressing material with decades of clinical use behind it. It creates a moist, sealed environment over an open lesion, which speeds re-epithelialisation and pulls exudate up into the patch. That white disc you see when you peel it off is fluid. Not the pimple, and not sebum being extracted.

So they work on a pustule that has already opened, or one you've picked. Sealed environment, no touching, no bacteria off your hands, faster healing, and meaningfully less post-inflammatory marking because you stopped interfering with it. That last part is arguably the main benefit, since a patch is a physical barrier between your fingers and the spot.

They do nothing on a closed comedone, where there's nothing to draw out and no open surface. Nothing on a cyst or a deep nodule either, because the inflammation sits far below where a surface dressing reaches, and you can leave one on for three days and the lump will be exactly as it was. On an unopened whitehead, minor flattening at best.

Medicated ones with salicylic acid or tea tree are a different product. Shallow delivery over a long contact time, which can work and also irritates the surrounding skin more. Plain hydrocolloid is the better default and it's cheaper. Microdart patches with dissolving tips are a genuine third category that do reach deeper lesions to a degree, mixed evidence, worth trying on the ones plain patches can't touch.

Clean dry skin, no serum or moisturiser underneath or it won't adhere. Overnight is fine, or until the disc goes fully white. One patch per spot, then stop, because the healing benefit is done once the wound has closed.

I used them on things that were never going to respond for about a year before working out what the white circle actually was.

Both sit under acne on the shelf and they work on different parts of the problem. Picking the wrong one is why a lot of people decide over-the-counter acne treatment doesn't work on them.

Salicylic acid is a beta hydroxy acid and it's oil-soluble, which is the whole point. It gets down inside the follicle rather than working on the surface, and it dissolves the keratin plug. That makes it the tool for comedonal acne, blackheads and closed bumps, congestion, the stuff that isn't red or sore. Against inflammatory acne it does very little, some anti-inflammatory effect and not much antibacterial punch.

Benzoyl peroxide is antibacterial. It releases oxygen into the follicle and C. acnes doesn't tolerate that, so it's the tool for papules and pustules, the red painful ones. Against closed comedones it does very little, because there's no bacterial driver in a plug that hasn't become inflamed.

Bumpy but not red, salicylic acid. Red and sore, benzoyl peroxide. Both at once, which is most real acne, means using them at different times of day rather than layering. BPO in the morning as a short-contact wash, salicylic acid at night, or split across alternate days. Stacking both on the same skin in the same sitting is a fast route to a wrecked barrier and it doesn't work better.

Two things worth knowing before you start. Benzoyl peroxide bleaches fabric, towels, pillowcases, the collar of a school shirt, and it catches everyone once. And start low: 2.5% BPO performs about as well as 10% in comparison studies while irritating dramatically less, and the higher percentages are mostly a marketing artefact. Same with salicylic acid, where 2% is the ceiling that matters and 0.5% to 1% in a leave-on is plenty for most people.

Give either one twelve weeks before deciding. Four weeks tells you how your skin tolerates it and nothing else.

I think I have a soobooji skin type with clogged pores - my skin can look greasy or even when I touch it on areas like my nose that has sebaceous fillaments, but it feels really dehydrated & itchy on some areas. I’m sensitive to high percentages of exfoliating acids that can dry my skin out, which is why I also prefer my cleanser to be gentle.

I’m on a mission to smoothen my skin from clogged pores & I want it to look hydrated & glowy, and I want to do this by using products that are good for the skin barrier.

So after seeing TikToks about how Butylene Glycol can break you out & cause bumps, it’s been concerning me because almost all Korean products I’ve come across have Butylene Glycol & l cannot afford to take any risks because I don’t want to splurge money on a product just for it to mess up my skin so I want to be extremely careful.

What are your opinions on this based on hearing about my skin type & concerns, and does anyone know products without Butylene Glycol?