Deep seated blackheads and how I managed to pop them after months trying

DISCLAIMER: Not medical advice. Not an esthetician. Just my personal experience. Try at your discretion and risk.

Tl;dr: Put a hydrocolloid acne patch on them for 24 hours, and remove and squeeze the blackheads out easily.

Background: I’m SE Asian, have combination skin with seborrheic dermatitis, large pores on my cheeks, also one of the oiliest regions on my face. I live with pets, in SoCal, prone to catching allergens and dust onto my oily skin. They would quickly clog my pores as keratin plugs and sebaceous filaments at first, then oxidize into blackheads. A blackhead can form on my face in matter of days.

I have tried all sorts of peel religiously, both physical and chemical (BHA, AHA, PHA, even the antagonized St Ives scrubs at times). I also integrated retinol into my routine, but to no avail. These blackheads will form and will stay if I don’t detect them soon enough to squeeze them out before they become deeply embedded into my skin. From afar they don’t look bad, near invisible, they feel like a very slight bump on the skin, but up close you can see the opening of the pimple very clearly, look grossly like a tiny skin barnacle, if you know what I’m talking about. Just an enlarged pore with something obviously clogged inside, ew. They disrupt the surface of any good makeup foundation, a breeding ground for bacteria, bother my peace of mind. And since the cheek is a soft part of the face, it’s near impossible to squeeze these gunk out even with brute force, eye-tearing pain, and sensitive blood vessel damage. They just stay there on my face, some for months.

Then came the pimple patch. These patches mostly are just some fancy hydrocolloid bandage. If you have worn this type of bandage over a wound for couple of hours, or days, you probably have noticed they make the wound very moist and the skin around it very malleable. So, long story short, I tried putting these patches on the stubborn blackheads, to force my body to “steam” them. I think most people use the patches only when they have red, large, unsightly acne, I haven’t heard anyone trying them on small, deep-seated, seemingly tiny plugs, so I think why the heck not? After 24 hours, as expected, the patches became white with oil and the skin underneath looked very soft. I removed the patches and immediately tried squeezing the blackheads in that state. Lo and behold! Without needing to apply much pressure, the gunk inside pops out cleanly, leaving tiny but deep holes. The satisfaction was some ASMR stuff for real! There was some redness around the squeeze area but nowhere near the irritation, I experienced when trying to dry-squeeze. Both the redness and the holes disappeared after a nice double cleanse with cold water.

So there you have it! AMA

No i didnt think of taking any pics unfortunately, but I have some internet photos here that most closely resemble mine. This is before:

Did you try putting anything under, like a salicylic acid gel, or would that break the adhesion?

I didn’t put any under, just bare skin. I believe the adhesive wouldn’t work on top of any chemical. But there are salicylic acid and tea tree oil-infused patches out there if you want to try that out