Skin Problems – Part 5

I have had eczema, specifically around my mouth for as long as I can remember. I call it my clown-mouth as it usually transpires as red marks at the corners of my mouth, a la clown. It doesn’t help that I also have a tiny car and giant shoes. I occasionally have a bit of irritation in the creases of my arms too but it’s my mouth that has always borne the brunt of the problem. Despite being able to pile on makeup in my teens and twenties with a trowel, I can’t now so much as look at a beautiful lipstick without my mouth prickling in irritation. It lets me apply a very gentle lip balm and that is it thank you very much! My mouth is a sensitive soul, let’s put it that way.

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Skin Problems – Part 4

It’s been over a year since my random skin outbreak occurred, with my last ‘skin problems’ update posted in March. My original plan had been to regularly update this blog with posts on how things were progressing but you know what, waking up every day and seeing no improvement was hugely disheartening, so I decided to leave it. I honestly thought that the reaction was something I’d have to live with and it wasn’t something I wanted to talk about all the time on here. Let me just re-cap, I’ve always had mild Eczema around my mouth and dealt any outbreaks by using a steroid cream, no not the kind to give me muscles or man boobs, but a prescribed cream to keep the eczema at bay. The problem was I’d been over-using this cream and a MASSIVE side effect (that I knew nothing about) was something called Perioral Dermatitis, a rather sexy and attractive big clown mouth rash. This appeared out of know where like an unwelcome smell on Boxing Day 2014 (Boxing Day hasn’t been kind to me these last two years!) then a few days later another WTF moment happened and some random red patches underneath my eyes appeared along with some swelling, I looked like I’d done ten rounds in the Boxing ring. I aged about twenty years in the space of a few weeks. Needless to say I hid inside the house for the whole of January.

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Skin Problems – Part 3

Skin, skin such a wonderful thing! Not in my case. After putting it off for a ridiculous amount of time, hoping my problems would just ‘go away’, I finally saw a Dermatologist about my skin reactions. After an initial consultation, he referred me to have some skin testing carried out to find out if I was allergic to a particular ingredient that you might find in an everyday product, like soap or shampoo for example. The Consultant treating me had chosen about forty items to be tested and along with these, I was also able to test my own creams, including some Liz Earle products that I’d just started using along with some other items like lip balms etc. Fifty products were placed in small pods, which were then put on my back and taped on. As you can see from the picture above, my back was covered! It felt very odd and after a day it became quite itchy, but I had it in my mind that it would be worth it, if it transpired that I was allergic to something specific.

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Skin Problems – Part 2

In my last post about my skin, I told you how I was suffering from a horrid rash around my mouth. My Doctor had given me antibiotics to treat this and although they seemed to be working at first, within a few days the symptoms started to reappear. Along with this, I’d also started to get some sort of reaction around my eyes, double yay! To say I was feeling pretty low is putting it mildly. Any catch ups with friends that I had scheduled in January, I cancelled, seeing only my family and husband. I just wanted to hide away in a corner until it all went away. Despite all efforts, my mouth rash and the small bumps seemed to fade one day, then reappear the next, I felt like I wasn’t getting to the route cause of whatever the issue was. The patches underneath each eye which had randomly started seemed to get worse, to the point where they were so swollen in the morning, I had to ice them. I looked like I’d done ten rounds in the boxing ring.  Continue reading

Skin Problems – Part 1

I have had eczema for as long as I can remember, mainly around my mouth but occasionally on my arms too. Various things can cause it to react, but the usual suspects are when the seasons change, when I use lots of sun cream or when I eat spicy food. I’ve never given it a second thought, when using the strong steroid cream I’ve always been prescribed by my Doctor on the red patches that I get. I call these red patches around my mouth, my clown mouth, because that’s basically what I look like. I know, sexy! Over the years I’ve managed to keep it under control with the use of the steroid cream and other than a few bad occurrences, its been kept in check, that is until now. The eczema around my mouth often eases in the summer and triggers when the weather gets colder, so it flared as it usually does when November/December hit and I began applying my cream as usual. I try not to use it too much as my Doctor does warns me that it can thin your skin but without thinking, I was definitely overdoing it. This time round however something was going on, my clown mouth wasn’t clearing. Over the Christmas period it got gradually worse until I woke up on Boxing Day looking a bit like the joker, with an exaggerated red rash at both sides of my mouth and small cuts appearing whenever I smiled. This combined with a hangover made for a fairly horrific day! Continue reading