Editor's note: This post contains graphic images of acne and other skin conditions.
- When you're dermatologist Dr. Sandra Lee, who is also known as Dr. Pimple Popper, every year is packed with blackheads, lipomas, and other skin growths that need treating, and 2019 was no different.
- These are the best pimple-popping videos of 2019, including blackheads that erupted like "fireworks" and a back hump filled with fat that oozed like "pizza cheese."
- In many cases, Lee's intervention improved people's lives, even helping one patient who had developed an eating disorder and depression due to her appearance.
- Visit Insider's homepage for more.
When you're dermatologist Dr. Sandra Lee, who is also known as Dr. Pimple Popper, every year is packed with blackheads, lipomas, and other skin growths that need treating, and 2019 was no different.
In 2019, the third season of Lee's TLC show "Dr. Pimple Popper" premiered and viewers got to witness the some of her greatest squeezes, pops, and incisions to date. The television-famous dermatologist also shared plenty of can't-look-away- pimple-popping videos on her YouTube and Instagram account pages.
All the while, she improved patients' lives, many of whom had serious confidence issues due to their appearances or who went to drastic measures to keep their conditions concealed.
These are the best pimple-popping videos of 2019.
In March, Lee removed a fast-growing and cancerous growth from a man's head.
The swollen and red bump is a skin condition called keratoacanthoma. Lee said these kinds of smaller carcinomas aren't life-threatening but "can certainly grow rather quickly and can therefore be scary to the patient."
To treat the bump, Lee performed a minor surgery in the area, which resulted in a gaping bloody hole in the patient's head. (Scroll at your own risk.)
Following the procedure, Lee said she used sutures to close up the hole. She also shared a picture of the clean, straight scar going down the back of the patient's head.
The last image in the series shows his head after a bit of healing, when the scar is basically non-existent. "He healed really well from it," Lee wrote.
The season 3 trailer of "Dr. Pimple Popper" featured Lee removing massive nose growths that prevented a man from breathing.
—TLC Network (@TLC) May 7, 2019As the brief video teases, Lee worked with a variety of patients during season 3, including a man with nose growths so big they prevented him from breathing, a teen with a brown rash that caused him to be teased at school, and a woman with ear cysts that gave her horrible headaches.
In previous seasons, Dr. Lee has treated similarly shocking cases, including a woman with fluid-filled cysts around her eyes, another woman with a painful "horn" growing in the back of her head, and a man with a decades-old cyst that was filled with a cottage cheese-like substance.
On Instagram, Lee showed followers how she drained a cyst that reminded her of Shamu the whale.
Lee shared an up-close-and-personal video of how she treated a patient's pilar cyst, which is a lump filled with the white-colored protein keratin. The video showed Lee draining the bloody cyst after she cut it open.
As a white liquid-filled bubble came out of the hole, Lee said it reminded her of Shamu, the orca who used to perform at SeaWorld. "Keep it poppin!" she wrote in the caption of her Instagram post.
Pilar cysts are the most common type of cyst, and usually develop on the scalp. According to the National Institutes of Health, less than 10% of the population gets pilar cysts. They typically aren't cancerous.
In May, Lee treated a man with an ear cyst that spurted out a thick white substance.
There’s no prize like a #surprise! And this hidden #cyst had a few of them! 💦💥😳 #drpimplepopper
The graphic video showed just how much liquid a cyst can hold, even if it looks small.
In the video, Lee cut open a man's earlobe area where he had a cyst. At first, blood came out of the incision. Then it spurted a clear liquid.
Lee pressed and squeezed the cyst more, releasing more blood and a thick white substance that was likely keratin, although Lee didn't specify.
It didn't appear like the cyst could hold that much liquid, and fans were shocked to see how much came out of the small area. "Wow!!!! Wasn't expecting it to be that good," one person commented. Another called the cyst "the gift that keeps on giving" because the thick white liquid seemed neverending.
"There's no prize like a #surprise! And this hidden #cyst had a few of them!" Lee wrote in the caption of her video.
She also coined a special pimple-popping technique called a 'Macgyver cyst punch' in one video.
In June, Lee shared a YouTube video in which she treated a man's back cyst with a special technique she referred to as "the MacGyver cyst punch."
In the video, Lee showed the technique and compared it to coring an apple. She used a device she referred to as a "punch" and placed it on top of the cyst, applying pressure so it created a 4-millimeter-deep hole in the cyst.
Then, Lee removed the punch device and was able to drain fluid out of the cyst with a few strategic squeezes.
She removed a woman's giant chest cyst by cutting it with a blade.
In June, Dr. Pimple Popper shared a video where she treated a woman's chest cyst.
To drain the large chest growth, Dr. Lee cut into the cyst with a sharp blade and then squeezed it multiple times to release a white liquid substance. In the caption for the Instagram video, Lee compared the substance that came out of the cyst to melted butter.
"When it's so hot outside you start #melting like #butter on a pancake 💥🥞💥 This SURPRISE STEATOCYSTOMA ON THE CHEST knows exactly how you feel," she wrote.
She squeezed blackhead 'fireworks' all over a man's face.
Ahead of the July 4th weekend, Dr. Pimple Popper shared a somewhat festive video that shows her treating a patient's blackheads, which she referred to as "fireworks."
"We believe in celebrating early, especially with #blackheads," she wrote in the post.
Lee used a pimple extractor tool with a looped end and tweezers to remove the man's blackheads, which appeared all over his face.
Blackheads are a type of acne that form when pores or hair follicles get clogged with sebum, a natural oil produced by the body. The sebum becomes black in color because when it touches the air, it oxidizes, Papri Sarkar, a dermatologist in Massachusetts, previously told Insider.
When Dr. Pimple Popper pressed on different areas of the man's face, the oxidized sebum released from his pores, creating the "fireworks."
During the season 3 premiere of her TV show, Lee cut 4 golf ball-sized growths off a woman's ears.
In the first episode of season 3, Dr. Pimple Popper worked with three patients. One was a woman named Jennifer, who had four golf ball-sized ear growths that she said gave her muffled hearing, headaches, nausea, and vertigo on a daily basis.
They also damaged her mental health. As a result of her appearance, Jennifer said she developed an eating disorder and fell into a depression.
"I'm in danger of not wanting to live anymore if I don't feel good about myself," she said on the show. Jennifer said she went to doctors, but most said they couldn't help her and that the growths were her fault due to her ear piercings.
But during Lee's initial meeting with Jennifer, Lee diagnosed the growths as keloids, a type of raised scar tissue that forms due to trauma to the area. According to the American Academy of Dermatology, these raised scars can grow to be much larger than the wound that caused the scar in the first place.
Lee explained that it was Jennifer's infected pierced ears that caused the keloids to form, though Lee said they were probably the largest she'd ever seen.
To treat Jennifer, Lee had to surgically remove the keloids. First, she used a local anesthetic on Jennifer's ears, then she carefully cut the growths off, trying to avoid as much of her actual ear tissue as possible.
Following surgery, Jennifer said it looked like half of her face was gone because the keloids were that large. Lee even weighed the detached growths, which were 14 ounces total.
On her show, Dr. Pimple Popper also drained an orange-sized lump that was growing on the back of a woman's thigh for 10 years.
On episode 2 of season 3 of "Dr. Pimple Popper," Lee treated a woman with an orange-sized lump on the back of her left thigh.
Leta, a 50-year-old woman from Montgomery, Alabama, said she first noticed the lump 10 years ago, but then, it was about the size of a grape.
Unfortunately, the lump grew to the size it was on the show, and Leta, whose last name wasn't disclosed, said the growth is "inconvenient to say the least."
During the episode, Leta walked viewers through her morning routine, during which she took great measures to conceal her lump. She first covered it in medical tape to secure it in place, and then put on Spanx shorts before finally putting on her dress. Even her fiancé hadn't seen the lump prior to the episode.
"There are a lot of days I'd rather just stay in bed," she said.
After examining the lump, Lee diagnosed it as a lipoma, a fat-filled growth that sits in the space between a person's muscle and skin, according to the Mayo Clinic. While it's unclear what causes lipomas, it's likely at least partly genetic. Fortunately, the lumps are not cancerous and usually harmless, the Mayo Clinic says.
To treat the lipoma, Lee first numbed the area with a local anesthetic, then punctured the lipoma with a sharp surgical tool. Immediately, the lump made a spurting and squeaking sound, and a white liquid and blood started to ooze out of it.
Once the lipoma was opened, Lee used her hands to remove the fibers inside of it, essentially draining the massive lump. After all of the fat and fibers were removed, Lee stitched up the incision to finish her work.
In another episode, Lee drained 7 cysts from a woman's head, including one that was toenail-shaped and wedged into her scalp.
In the "Dr. Pimple Popper" episode, Lee treated a 53-year-old Florida woman named Rhonda who had seven cysts on her head, including one that resembled a toenail.
Rhonda, whose last name wasn't disclosed, told Lee that she'd seen many doctors over the years, but all of them said that in order to treat her they would have to shave her entire head. For that reason, Rhonda never went through with treatment.
She said the "toenail" bump on the top of her scalp was particularly concerning because it opened up and then scabbed over. It "smells like something rotten," Rhonda said.
To hide her bumps, Rhonda said she took extra care to style her hair. In fact, she revealed that she'd hidden her bumps from most of her family members and only told her daughter about a few of them. "Thank God for side parts and big hair," she said.
At first, Lee was surprised to see Rhonda in her office because her hair hid all of her growths. Once Rhonda showed the dermatologist her seven growths, however, Lee said she was shocked by the quantity of them and that the toenail growth was especially startling.
To treat Rhonda, Dr. Pimple Popper first worked on the biggest bump, which she identified as a keloid cyst. Although the growths aren't usually harmful to a person's health, they can cause discomfort because they're tender, according to Healthline.
After giving Rhonda a local anesthetic, Lee cut the bump open in the middle with a surgical knife. To finish treating the keloid, Lee carefully opened the incision she made and used scissors to cut the cyst out of the skin part of the bump.
Another time, she treated a man's cantaloupe-sized back hump, which she said was the messiest growth she's ever seen.
The growth, a lipoma, had been growing on the neck of a man named Paul Duke for 10 years. In the episode, Duke, 51, from Waller, Texas, said the growth started as a small knot on his neck when he was about 15 years old.
When Duke started taking steroids for a nerve problem, he noticed his hump starting to get bigger and bigger, he said. About four years ago the hump was the size of a softball, Duke said, but by the time he was filming the episode it had grown to the size of three softballs.
Duke said that when he asked his doctors about the growing lump, they ignored the problem and "said it was nothing."
Duke eventually went off the steroids, but the large hump remained and concerned him because it limited his range of motion as an RV delivery man and became the brunt of jokes among his friends and strangers, who called him "the Hunchback of Notre Dame."
At Lee's office, Duke explained his theory about why the lump grew so large: that it was because of the steroids he had taken.
Growths called "buffalo humps" are common in people who take steroids for medication, according to the Johns Hopkins Vasculitis Center. That's because steroids often lead to the redistribution of body fat to a person's head or neck. When that fat accumulates, it can lead to a hump-like appearance.
Lee said that while that could be the case, she also had a feeling that his growth might actually be a lipoma but would have to cut it open to be sure.
Lee's suspicions were correct. Once she numbed Duke's neck area, she cut open his hump and found it was filled with fat, signaling that it was a lipoma, not a buffalo hump.
Lee said that to remove all the fat, she had to "massage it out," comparing the appearance of the fat to pizza cheese. There was so much fat in the growth that Lee said it was the messiest lipoma she'd ever treated.
Once she took all the "cheese" out of Duke's neck hump, Lee was able to stitch the incision up so that all it left was a "smile-shaped scar," as Duke put it.
Following the procedure, Duke regained full mobility of his neck and said the change would allow him to be safer at work.
You can also watch Dr. Pimple Popper extract a man's forehead blackheads that one viewer described as 'stubborn.'
In August, Lee shared a video in which she extracted various blackheads on a man's forehead. One viewer commented on the video, calling the blackheads "stubborn," noticing that the spots required at least two or three attempts in order to be fully extracted.
Dr. Pimple Popper used a special looped extraction tool to push the sebum and other gunk out of the man's blackheads.
She also told the patient in the video that she believed he had more blackheads than most because of his occupation as a firefighter, saying that "all of the soot and smoke" likely clogged his pores.
In August, Lee popped two lipomas on one of her patients.
To treat her patient's two lipomas, Dr. Pimple Popper used a small blade to make a tiny incision in each lipoma. Then, she squeezed each with gloved fingers to remove the fat inside the growths.
With the first lipoma, a clump of fat popped out of the incision almost instantly, which Lee then pulled with tweezers and cut out of the patient's body.
The second lipoma was a bit more stubborn, but eventually came out with a pop. The patient told Dr. Pimple Popper he could feel the lipoma release from under his skin.
- Read more:
- Dr. Pimple Popper's favorite acne to treat is a special kind of blackhead
- Dr. Pimple Popper reveals 4 things she wishes she could tell dermatology patients but can't
- Dr. Pimple Popper reveals her nighttime skincare routine, and it only includes 3 steps
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