My apologies for disappearing for so long.  I had intended to take a day or two off and that turned into around 10 days…yikes.  I could give you a list of excuses, or I could just get to the actual news: the red light therapy is still coming along very nicely!

I have continued it every single day, just as I had been when I last blogged about it. I have taken pictures every day, as well.  I was going to try to figure out some way to post them all here on this blog, but I think that what I will do is create a new page for this website (when I get around to it, hopefully soon) so that I can just post all of the pictures from the very beginning.  That way, I can blog here once or twice a week when I have great rosacea treatment topics to talk about, and it will still be possible to see the daily progress with the pictures on the other page of this site.

In an earlier post (Day 9: How to Control Rosacea Flushing) I brought up the fact that I had previously used seabuckthorn rosacea treatment products with some success.

My Seabuckthorn Rosacea Treatment Experience

The ones that I have tried are all from a company called SBT Seabuckthorn Seabuckthorn. As a side note, this company is great.  I had a question and they emailed me back within minutes with a personal response to my question.  If you like seabuckthorn products, I highly recommend SBT for their awesome customer support.

Back when I first got into this ingredient, SBT had an actual starter kit for rosacea sufferers, which I didn’t think that they sold anymore, but when I dug up the link for the company, I just discovered that they do actually have it, it’s just very hard to find on their site (if you want to see it, it’s called the Seabuckthorn 2 Month Rosacea Treatment Regime).  The kit includes: seabuckthorn seed oil supplement capsules, seabuckthorn seed oil, and the “berry bar” which is a bar of soap that has seabuckthorn in it, among other natural ingredients.

It came with a full instruction sheet that explained how to use the products, including taking the capsules each day, washing your face very gently with the soap, and delicately rubbing a few drops of the oil into your skin.

The picture to the right includes the instruction sheet, the seed oil, and the berry bar, as well as the salve (I’ll discuss that later in this blog).  I don’t have the container for the capsules anymore, so they didn’t make it into this image.

The capsules were easy to take.  They were somewhat like those vitamin E gel caps that they sell at the pharmacy, in case you’ve ever tried those.  I didn’t notice any unpleasant taste or aftertaste, but I tend to swallow pills very easily, in general, and not have problems with them.  I’m not sure if they helped or not (I’m not even sure how I’d go about measuring that), but they were far too expensive for me to continue using over the long term, so I had to give them up once I was finished with the starter kit.

The soap was my least favourite part of the seabuckthorn products.  I found that it had an unpleasant waxy feeling and it left a kind of buildup on my skin (both my hands and my face).  I have seen awesome reviews for the soap, so maybe I was using it wrong (I was using it like normal soap), but I just wasn’t all that happy with the feeling of it.  Still, I stuck with it for several months to give it a fair shot.  I was willing to deal with unpleasant feeling soap if it meant that it gave me healthy skin. When all is said and done, I think that it did neither harm nor good – which is still better than most of the products I have tried.

The seabuckthorn seed oil was my favourite part of the experience.  It smelled like the wood oil that we used to finish a project in shop class (which I took from grade 6 through 8.  Lots of fun!), but it made my skin feel incredible.  I didn’t mind smelling like a furniture store if it meant that my skin felt satiny.  For several months, it also healed my skin quite well.  It was especially nice in the wintertime.  The downside, though, was that I have very pale skin, so the colour of the oil was enough to turn my face orange (as per the photo on the right).  As you can see from that photo, I didn’t look like a pumpkin, but I did look like I was wearing a very bad self-tanning product.  Check out the contrast between the colour of my face and neck!

I found the seed oil to be too heavy for the hottest summer months, so I stopped using it until the weather cooled down.  Then, I tried to start using it again.  Apparently, my skin changed its mind about its seabuckthorn rosacea treatment.  Where it had previously been very helpful, suddenly it started making my skin feel hot and I broke out in little bumps every time I applied it.  That was very frustrating, because I really thought that I was onto something.  Just as I was willing to be a little bit wood-scented, I was also willing to look a little bit orange to achieve healthy skin.  But it turns out that this was not for me, either.

The one product that I continue to use is the Rosacea Soothing Salve that you can see in the picture of the SBT products, above.  That is a thick substance that feels somewhat like petroleum jelly when it is applied to the skin (though it doesn’t contain petroleum jelly).  That may sound gross, but in the winter, when you are facing temperatures that are extremely cold and winds that are terribly biting, a thin layer of this stuff will keep ultra dry and sensitive skin protected.  I find it too heavy to wear for any reason except protection against extreme cold, but for that purpose, it works very well.

Red Light Therapy Rosacea Treatment Update 

Now back to our regularly scheduled program. I am continuing to see daily progress with the red light therapy rosacea treatment.  It is not a speedy process because my skin has a lot of healing to do, but at the same time, it has come a long way.

I haven’t felt a rosacea flare-up in more than a week.  I have blushed (I’m a blusher by nature) but my skin hasn’t been flushing.  Any bumps that I still have on my face (I have one left on each cheek) are dry, flat, and nearly completely healed.  The redness has become a pale-to-medium pink.  My skin “feels” perfectly normal.  It never feels hot, itchy, or dry, and it is now soft and healthy-feeling to the touch.

To be honest, if this was as good as it could get, I would be perfectly content with the red light therapy and would continue it forever.  At the same time, it’s exciting to check out my progress each day.  The one down side is that it is making me more vain than I have been in a very long time! I used to look at myself in the mirror once or twice per day.  Now, I’m constantly staring at myself and deciding where my face is improving!

Here are my most recent pictures:

More soon!

If you have tried non-lazer light therapy rosacea treatments or seabuckthorn products and would like to share your own experience, please feel free to do so in the comments, below!