The 10 Most common treatment mistakes
most Fordyce spots sufferers make

Not targeting all 4 root causes of Fordyce spots at the same time

As discussed earlier, our most current scientific understanding is that there are 4 underlying causes of Fordyce spots:

• They can be caused by misplaced oil glands with no open route for the oil to escape from
• They can be caused by lipid-rich cells found next to your oil glands
• They can be caused by oversized oil glands
• They can be caused by overactive oil glands

Most products on the market often only target one these root causes at most while ignoring the others. It’s no wonder that these treatments have an over 90% failure rate even when used diligently.

Remember, unless you treat all 4 of these causes simultaneously, your treatment efforts are bound to be unsuccessful.

Using a brute force method to “remove” your Fordyce spots

Never, ever try to squeeze, pop, freeze, burn or poke your Fordyce spots. Remember, unlike a pimple, under each Fordyce spot resides a fully functional sebaceous gland. Glands by their very nature are sensitive to injury and damaging them can trigger an inflammatory response. This can leave your skin inflamed, discolored or even permanently scarred.

Treating Fordyce spots requires a more finessed approach where the glands should be allowed to naturally shrink and the trapped sebum is safely dispersed.

Confusing superficial improvements with actual results

Many products promoted for Fordyce spots are just relabeled moisturizers and skin resurfacing treatments. At best they simply provide temporary and superficial improvements. The moisturizers in these products visually trick you into thinking the spots have slightly softened while the exfoliants minimally smooth the skin surface.

Note how neither of these things treat any of the 4 underlying causes of Fordyce spots:

Inevitably when you stop using these products, your skin returns to its previous state and your Fordyce spots end up looking no different.

Not measuring your results

Most Fordyce spot treatments rely on the placebo effect as much as they can in hopes that wishful thinking clouds your perception. Many users of these products begin to believe that the product is working but when they compare their results with before/after pictures, it soon becomes apparent that the Fordyce spots haven’t changed at all.

Any good therapy should allow you to measure your results on a regular basis so that you can quantify how well the treatment is working.

Ignoring the pigmentation issue

This is a huge problem that even the more expensive laser and electrodessication treatments get wrong.

Consider this…

What makes Fordyce spots look unattractive? It’s not just that they are clusters of unsightly bumps. What makes them look especially odd is that they are slightly off-colored compared to the surrounding skin.

This makes them stand out even more.

Many times, treatments are able to smooth-out the bumps but very often the patient is still left with clusters of off-colored dots in their place. Even worse, sometimes the treatments themselves cause either hypopigmentation (white dots) or hyperpigmentation (darker dots) at the site of the Fordyce.

If your goal is to get back to perfectly even-toned skin, your treatment should address this pigment imbalance issue.

A good treatment should do two things:

• It should prevent skin depigmentation by protecting your melanocytes from damage
• It should prevent hyperpigmentation by preventing your melanocytes dysfunction

Using products that only come in one strength

Beware of any company offering a magic bullet solution for Fordyce spots by selling a product that only comes in one strength. The truth is, it is impossible for any single strength formula to perfectly eliminate all Fordyce spots in all people.

That’s because there is a lot of variability between people and their Fordyce spots:

• Some Fordyce spots are found close to the epidermis, while some are located deep in the sub-dermis
• Some sufferers have a much thicker epidermis than others
• Some sufferers are more prone to inflammation, scarring and discoloration than others

Now how can a single product strike the perfect balance of product strength to make sure all the Fordyce spots at all depths are treated without going overboard and causing discoloration or scarring in any single individual?

It’s not possible and you shouldn’t give any company the benefit of the doubt when it comes to achieving this feat.

Instead, you should make sure that the therapy you use allows you to move up and down in product strength based on your particular skin physiology. This allows you to customize your treatment and get guaranteed perfect results.

Not addressing the permeability problem

While trying something too strong can risk injuring your sebaceous gland, opting for a therapy that is too weak is likely to lead to treatment failure.

Many Fordyce spots products use ingredients like retinol in order to treat the problem. However, these active ingredients and many others like them only act on the surface of your skin.

The problem is that much of the formulation for these products borrow from the field of cosmetic science which only limits itself to manipulating the uppermost layer of your skin (the epidermis). Fordyce spots on the other hand are a sub-dermal problem and this requires a giant technical leap in active ingredient delivery mechanisms.

Remember, our skin is a very effective barrier. It keeps foreign substances out with great effectiveness and for good reason. If it was so easy for these substances to get deep under your skin, we would be inundated with all sorts of diseases and toxicities.

Delivering the active compounds deep under your Fordyce spots requires careful navigation:

• You have to effectively get past the epidermal barrier
• You have to do this without damaging the tissue or triggering an immune response
• You also have to prevent damage to the pigment producing melanocytes on the way in
• You also to preserve the collagen meshwork so that the spots don’t sink in too deep
• And you have to protect the glandular tissue throughout the treatment process

This is a technically monumental task that requires an in-depth understanding of histology, immunology and endocrine function. This goes far beyond the expertise of most topical product companies, so be sure to choose a therapy that addresses this crucial delivery issue head-on.

Using a product not specifically tested on Fordyce spots

There is no shortage of over-the-counter products that are often used by Fordyce spot sufferers desperate to treat their problem. These include wart treatments, skin tag treatments, cryotherapies, drawing salves, chemical peels and acne products.

As safe as these products are for their intended uses, they can actually make your Fordyce spots look worse.

Remember, Fordyce spots are a sub-dermal gland problem and not an epidermal skin problem. In other words, these bumps aren’t just superficial skin protrusions that can be fixed by peeling away at the surface. There is no pus or dead cell debris that needs to be “cleansed out”.

There is an oversized and perhaps an overactive gland with trapped sebum under each Fordyce spot.

• This gland needs to be safely shrunk and its activity downgraded, without causing damage to it.
• The trapped sebum needs to be dispersed into the surrounding tissue, not forced out the surface.

The dermal tissue under your Fordyce spots has unique histological features and you shouldn’t treat it like normal skin. Neither should you use products on them that are made for other skin conditions.

Using a method that doesn’t give you permanent results

Most therapies fall on two opposite sides of the treatment spectrum…

• They either treat your spots too haphazardly and end up giving you permanently imperfect results (like lasers)
• They put you on this endless journey of playing catchup with regrowing Fordyce spots

This second problem is far more common.

Many times, a product might manage to reduce the trapped sebum under your Fordyce spots or might even temporarily reduce the sebaceous gland’s oil production. However, the moment you discontinue your therapy, the gland resumes its oil production and your spots quickly return to their previous state.

This is because the sebaceous gland is constantly regenerating and interacting with the endocrine system which ensures its activity stays stable.

This means you would be stuck buying and applying the product endlessly for temporary results.

A good therapy should give you long term results. It should not only shrink your sebaceous gland and safely downgrade its ongoing oil production, it should offer you a way to proactively treat new spots that might form in the earliest stages.

This will ensure that your existing spots stay away for good and new spots never become visible in the first place.

Spending too much money on your Fordyce spots treatment

Too often we fall into the trap of thinking that more expensive means better results. Fordyce spots therapies are a perfect example of why this isn’t always true.

Take laser treatments for instance.

While laser treatments do have a high success rate and the visual results tend to be pretty good, the reason for the high expense of this therapy has less to do with its effectiveness and more to do with the fact that the treatment is administered by a doctor in a clinical setting using an expensive piece of equipment.

In order to recover the cost of the doctor’s time, the clinic’s rent and the equipment’s expense, the price of the therapy is forced to be high.

Add to this the fact that most patients require multiple sessions to treat all their spots and the real cost of these therapies begins to climb to a new high.

What’s counterintuitive however, is that this high cost doesn’t offer you the best results possible. When a doctor aims a laser at an individual Fordyce spot and zaps it, they are essentially taking their best guess at the spot’s depth. Quite often, the laser aims its controlled destruction at the wrong depth and the sebaceous gland is either partially damaged or left completely untouched.

This is why many patients require repeat procedures to allow the doctor to take another try at the spots.

It’s clear that a better approach instead of using such a brute force method, is to reverse the problem biochemically on a cellular level.

This approach is more deliberate and thorough because it puts you in control. A brief 15-20 minute window at the doctor’s office is simply not an effective way of properly treating all your Fordyce spots.

A targeted topical therapy is not only far cheaper, it allows you to focus more on your individual Fordyce spots with a level of diligence only you would give yourself. With an effective topical therepy, you could focus more on the stubborn spots while stopping applications on areas that have become perfectly smooth and even toned.

This is something that is simply not possible with the more expensive procedures.

Now that you know which problems to look out for, here are 10 things that every good Fordyce spots treatment should have. Miss any one of these 10 things and your treatment is likely to fail.