Dr Pimple Popper: California dermatologist stunned by how many people get a kick out of ick
- Four years ago, Dr Sandra Lee posted a video of herself doing a blackhead extraction and it went viral. Now she is a guru of skincare with a TV show on TLC
- Cysts, lumps, abscesses, pus-filled carbuncles – patients travel halfway round the world for treatment. ‘I’m a born-again popaholic,’ Chinese-American says
Dr Sandra Lee was running a successful medical practice in Upland, a city in California about 50km (30 miles) outside Los Angeles, seeing patients with a roster of general dermatological issues when she posted a video of herself on the clinic’s Instagram account doing a blackhead extraction.
The video went viral and suddenly Lee realised she was on to something of huge interest. “I saw that we got a big increase in attention,” said Lee of the posting, four years ago. “It happened again and again. I quickly realised that this was a thing.”
The “this” referenced by Lee is an apparent – and unfathomable – global obsession with the art of “pimple popping”, a term that covers a mind-boggling array of skin eruptions.
The internet is now filled with viral videos of cysts being lanced, abscesses being drained and gargantuan spots being speared. They’re not just facial growths either; pus-filled carbuncles can appear anywhere on the body, and the bigger, ickier and more gross, the more avid the fascination.
“As a dermatologist, you see these things all the time,” said Lee. “I just didn’t know that other people enjoyed seeing them so much.” In a few short years, she has amassed more than 10 million followers on her social media channels, and her YouTube videos have been seen more than 2.6 billion times.
People could not get enough of her work, so in February 2018, American channel TLC gave the doctor her own show, Dr Pimple Popper, which is now in its second season.