What deep cleansing couldn't fix

What deep cleansing couldn’t fix was the smallest thing on my face. Under my lower lip there is a line of tiny, whitehead-like bumps that I have had since high school. Most days nobody can see them. When I roll my lips inward or press my tongue against the inside of my chin, they rise. Under BB cream or foundation, they show, at least to my eyes.

For years I treated them as a cleaning problem. If something was stuck in my pores, I would get it out.

What did my deep cleansing routine look like?

It had more steps than most people’s full routine, and I kept every one of them up for years.

The base was oil. I have been double cleansing with cleansing oils and balms for more than ten years, since before “double cleansing” was a phrase anyone used. Twice a week I do a deep cleanse, and I still do. I melt the oil in dry hands, roll it gently over a dry face, add warm water until it turns milky, rinse, then wash again with a gel or foam.

Once a week, on top of that, I used an AHA/BHA product from the pharmacy. I still do that too.

About once a month, I put a sebum-softening product on before washing, left it to soften the skin, then wiped it away.

Two or three times a month, I held a warm steam towel over my face for four or five minutes.

And in high school, the bumps and the breakouts I got around my period sent me to a dermatologist for extractions once a month.

What did all that cleansing actually do?

It kept my skin clean, and I do not want to undersell that. The one time I left out the second wash after oil, my pores ended up more clogged, not less. The routine was doing something.

What it did not do was touch the bumps. Year after year, the texture under my lip looked the same when I pushed my tongue against it. I kept adding steps, and I kept thinking the next one would be the one that reached them.

Why didn’t it reach the bumps?

Because, as I eventually understood, the problem was not on the surface. A 2024 dermatology review describes how this kind of blockage starts: cells build up inside the pore duct as “invisible microcomedones”, which the authors call the initial stage of comedone formation. Cleansing works on what is on top of the skin. What I had was sitting inside the pore.

That reframed ten years for me. I had been scrubbing harder at the wrong layer.

What finally changed the texture?

Retinal, and I came to it almost by accident.

I had avoided retinoids for years. They seemed too irritating to use every day, they were for night only, and they demanded sunscreen the next morning. Most sunscreens made my eyes sting badly enough to give me a headache for the rest of the day, so I disliked sunscreen, and keeping track of retinoid nights felt like a chore on top of that.

What I finally used was K-SECRET’s SEOUL 1988 retinal eye patches and pads, because they were easy. Disclosure: editor-affiliated brand. I put them on before bed and slept in them. After about two months, I felt the bumps under my lip getting shallower. Not gone. Shallower. My first thought was simple: so it was the retinal.

The longer version of that story is in the first entry of this journal.

Do I still deep cleanse?

Yes. Twice a week with oil or balm, and once a week with an AHA/BHA, the same as before.

I just stopped expecting it to do a job it was never built for. Cleansing gets my skin clean and ready for whatever comes next. For texture that lives inside the pore, I needed something that works on how the skin there renews itself.

The method I follow is in I was double cleansing before it had a name. If you want the evidence side, on what oil can and cannot dissolve and which ingredients reach inside the pore, it is in our companion piece, Does oil cleansing remove closed comedones?

The three cleansing oils in the photo above are ones I have used. One of them, the SEOUL 1988 Cleansing Oil, is also from K-SECRET.

Related: Closed comedones: what causes them and what clears them