Emergency Spot Interventions

by ELIZABETH GARONE, online.wsj.com
June 18th 2012 9:55 AM

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It's the night before a big interview and staring out at you from the bathroom mirror is a bright red pimple on your face. You frantically do a Google search for an overnight cure: Windex, diaper cream, toothpaste, really?

What to use: A high-dosage hydrocortisone cream

What not to use: Windex

Roy Grekin, director of the Dermatologic Surgery and Laser Center at the University of California, San Francisco, says he has seen it all: Patients who tried burning a pimple off with matches, scraping it, or frying their skin with a sunlamp. "None of those things will help" and all of them will hurt, Dr. Grekin says. No matter how tempting, resist the urge to pop it, he says. "It becomes scabbed and encrusted and takes longer to heal."

You want to try to flatten it and minimize the redness through less chancy means. "The best thing you can do is get a hold of as potent a corticosteroid or cortisone cream as you can," he says.

The strongest one on the market is clobetasol, which requires a prescription. A couple of dabs of clobetasol "will get rid of almost all the redness and the inflammation, certainly within 12 hours," he says. There is a downside. Long-term use can thin the skin, but it would take weeks for that to happen.

If clobetasol isn't available, then look for the highest dosage of hydrocortisone cream you can find (1% without a prescription). Also pick up some benzoyl peroxide. "You put a little dab of that on and a little dab of cortisone, kind of alternating them," he says. "The benzoyl peroxide tends to be very drying and the cortisone will get rid of the swelling and the redness."

Do this before going to bed and then when you get up in the morning. Covering it with a Band-Aid will increase the potency of the creams.

Whatever you do, don't put Neosporin, an antibiotic cream, on a pimple, says Dr. Grekin. "There are so many people who are allergic to it that you could have a much worse reaction to it than just the pimple." In 2010, neomycin, one of its main ingredients, won the American Contact Dermatitis Society's dubious award for contact allergen of the year.

If you don't have time to search for hydrocortisone or benzoyl peroxide, says Dr. Grekin, get your hands on an astringent or some other drying agent.

What about toothpaste? "It helps shrink and dry it," he says. "It's probably not as good as the benzoyl peroxide but it probably works."

If the diaper cream you have in the medicine cabinet has hydrocortisone in it, it should work. And while Windex could dry your skin out, Dr. Grekin doesn't recommend it. "What you put on your skin gets into your skin and gets into your blood supply," he says.

—Elizabeth Garone

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