I’m feeling very frustrated right now.  I have experienced a setback in my red light therapy.  I hope that I won’t end up having to start the rosacea treatment as though from scratch, but I’ve had a reaction to a product that I’ve used and now my skin looks just as bad as it did way back at the start!

I have been trying to take good care of my skin because there are a lot of lifestyle changes that need to be made to keep rosacea symptoms under control and I’d like to give this treatment the best shot.  One of the important steps that need to be taken is sunscreen application. I have been wearing sunscreen dutifully over the last few years, whenever I would be spending more than 10 minutes in direct sunlight.

So since I knew I’d be out for at least an hour, I put on my sunscreen, which was AVEENO® PROTECT + HYDRATE™ Sunscreen Lotion SPF 60. This product is meant for face and body and I’d had a lot of luck with the bottle that I bought last year.  That finally ran out and I started a new one from this year.  The new bottle was not as lucky.  I don’t know if the formula is different or if my skin just changed its mind about liking it, but I ended up with massive tomato-coloured redness on my face and a ton of little ugly bumps.  My skin was so inflamed that it looked shiny like plastic.  😦

To be fair to the sunscreen, I had no problems with it on my neck, shoulders and arms.  It was just the rosacea symptoms that flared up from it.

To make matters worse, it took me forever to get it all off.  Using an ultra-gentle cleanser and my fingertips to wash my face (since you should never use anything more abrasive than gentle fingertips on rosacea!) took four washes to get the sunscreen off.  After all of that, I probably should have just used soap and a washcloth, since my skin was so irritated from being washed four times in a row.

I have done my red light therapy rosacea treatment…

…but it’s too soon to tell if it will put me back to the same level of progress that I had reached before this sunscreen disaster.

To make matters worse, when I woke up this morning, I could see more progress in the improvement of my rosacea symptoms. Now it’s gone!  I wish I had taken a picture at the time.  But I was trying to be “scientific” and stick to the same time for the pictures every day.

I just hope that things will be better by tomorrow and that I won’t feel like I’m starting from the beginning again.

For now, here are the post-red light therapy pictures:

Actually, now that I’ve looked at the pictures, I think that some of it has calmed down (or the camera didn’t pick up the colours very well).

Here’s to staying positive! Maybe it’ll be better by tomorrow!