How to prepare skin for the dermabrasion surgery

According to my surgeon no changes in my regular skin care routine were necessary before the dermabrasion procedure.

However, according to the internet research that I did, most surgeons recommend stoping taking Accutane (Isotretinoin) at least six months before dermabrasion. If you don't, you run into higher risk of hyperpigmentation after the procedure. I was never taking Accutane, so I was not worried about that.

Also, several surgeons recommend treating your skin with Retin-A (retinoic acid/tretinoin) for about one month before the procedure. Retinoic acid improves skin texture by causing skin cells to turn over more rapidly and by increasing the amount of collagen. I decided that in my case it would be better to use glycolic acid instead of Retin-A. Glycolic acid offers similar benefits to Retin-A: it improves skin texture and appearance by promoting skin cell turnover. I used it at the concentration of 35% once a week for six weeks before the surgery.

In my personal judgment, it did a good job at evening out my skin texture and coloring. In a result, my skin definitely looked much better before the surgery than it looks now, a month after the surgery. But according to my doctor that is normal and I will only start to see the results of the surgery in a few months.

my skin 30 days after dermabrasion

Only on a day of my surgery I learned that my face will be red (or actually "pinkish" according to the terminology used my dermatologist/surgeon) for several weeks after the procedure. When I found that out, I was seriously considering canceling the surgery. Especially that my doctor told me that even though for most people the period of skin redness lasts between 6-12 weeks, she had a patient whose face remained red for a whole year... That really scared me off, but then, mentally, I was already past the critical decision time to cancel the surgery (I already paid for it, I was officially admitted to the hospital, I was wearing pajamas, I had a catheter inserted into one of my veins and I even had my first dosage of antibiotics and painkillers delivered through it already). So I decided to go through the surgery and see what happens, hoping that my skin will heal fast.

I am reasonably happy with the speed of my skin recovery as I see day-to-day improvements in its condition. Still, as you can see from the photos below, I am pretty red and I need to wear a make up all the time. That is very annoying to me as I like to have "a natural look" and I hate wearing make up. It also took me a lot of time and effort to figure out make up that will be able to cover my skin redness. I will dedicate a separate post to that issue.

This is how my face looks 30 days after the dermabrasion:


Some areas of my face are more red than others:


This is how I can make my face look after applying a corrective make up:


On the close up you can still see a demarcation line on my forehead, which I was unable to mask fully with make up:



Also, 7 hours after applying the make up, you can see the redness of my skin coming through at several places, e.g. on my chin:

The beginning

Four weeks ago I underwent a full face dermabrasion procedure.

Before (and also after) the procedure I spent hours in the internet searching for reliable "before and after" photos of people who had facial dermabrasion done to them. I could not find any of such photos. The only ones that I found were provided by plastic surgery clinics. I do not trust those.

While my skin was healing after the dermabrasion, I went through many phases of pain, itching, tingling and skin resurfacing, for which I was totally not prepared. Again, I could find very little information in the internet that would help me deal with what was happening to me.

That's why I decided to write this blog. I hope it will help some of you to decide if dermabrasion is the way you want to go about your skin problem. Also, I hope that it will help the ones of you who decided to undergo dermabrasion to better prepare for what will be happening to you after the procedure.