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Below is the Stanford University Study on IPL light treatment:
And this guy seems to be using a better routine (if visible results are the key measure) than Bryan Johnson…
You have to note also that his BF is no near 6% 
(if we trust his age for sure we must take into consideration he had many invasive cosmetic procedures, seems at least neck lift, for sure face lift, blepharoplasty, his brows move really unnaturally, possibly brow lift or browpexy…)
But I am getting interested in micro dosing isotretinoin for skin anti aging. 
yes - me too. Its easy enough to just add an order of a 100 of the 40mg Accutane tablets (at a cost of $50) in my next Indian Pharmacy order.
Of course, there is always the downside and risks associated with another medication added to the mix. I generally try to minimize polypharmacy risks. But - low dose, pulsed dosing seems like it might not add too much risk.
Guys I would never play with megadoses of Vit A (what Accutane essentially is) taken orally, unless there’s horrible acne that doesn’t budge. Too many downstream repercussions. Women get birth defects from it and it stands to reason it must be doing something off target to men as well.
What’s wrong with topical tret?
What are you thinking in terms of dosing and frequency?
Nothing really. I was just wondering if low dose accutane might be better for skin, topical is probably not absorbed in deeper layers and I am interested if this could be beneficial (autophagy?). Other that that I have horribly oily skin and large pores and maybe low dose isotretinoin might be beneficial. I get so oily I could produce facial cream for at least two other faces microbotox injections mesotherapy help, but are too painful for me to repeat every few months.
Dutasteride is a drug which supposedly can help with oily skin.
Excess oiliness is usually the outcome of or exacerbated by the wrong skincare routine. Can you tell me how you take care of your face and what you do to it on the regular, from cleansing and how you cleanse and how often and what after?
Re: Tret only affecting the outer layers that’s totally fine. It’s more than sufficient for it to do its job.
I had oily skin from my teens. My aunt who is dermatologist always joked that I have perfect skin that will not age, since it has the fine texture of my mothers and thickness that comes with oiliness from my father. I really have no problems with wrinkles or sagging, but oiliness is persisting. I tried everything and it just doesn’t help. Nothing makes it better and nothing makes it worse. Ok, really harsh washing or using the wrong moisturizer sure can make it worse, but not that much.
My current routine is using just water to wash my face (usually when taking my morning/evening shower), afterwards I use few spritzes of moisturizing toner (currently I use ultracalming mist from Dermalogica). In the eveing I follow with 0,05% tretinoin cream (Tretinoin, Glycerol Stearate, Ceteareth-20, Sorbitol Solution (70%), Cetyl Esters Wax, Phytosqualene, Butylhydroxyanisole (E320), Disodium Edetate, Magnesium Sulfate Heptahydrate, Benzoic Acid E210, Purified Water) in the morning I use Ordinary 2% salicylic acid solution, followed by sunscreen if I am going out, if I stay in usually I don’t put anything else on my skin. I rotate several sunscreens, now I use La Roche Posay ANTHELIOS UVMUNE 400 OIL CONTROL FLUID SPF50 PLUS or this Kieh’s that has unfortunately been discontinued.
If you have any comment on my routine and proposal how to improve it it would be greatly appreciated.
That sounds like a good routine actually. But in my experience especially with oily skin things can go wrong with the washing / cleansing stage. Anything with surfactants is too harsh and actually sets off the production of excess sebum as a coping mechanism for skin once its barrier has been disrupted. I used to have pretty oily skin (not exactly as you described but close) and only finally got it under control a few years ago by cleansing with grape seed oil mixed with colloidal oatmeal. The linoleic acid of the oil is very skin friendly and the oatmeal has gentle saponins that work like surfactants but are much milder. If you do this the finish after you rinse is a thin velvety film that I found really put a damper on my oil production. Another thing that really helped after a while was to wash it less and less — only as needed. The less often I washed it the better the sebum production. But to pull that off you need to slow down on all the other products you use post cleansing otherwise they build up and it’s nasty. I’d say try it for a couple of weeks to reset the skin’s sebum production baseline and slowly reintroduce them afterwards.
Last but not least for me was making water kefir and using it with a spray bottle to spray my skin with it 2-3x a day. I know most of those strains can’t survive on human skin as they’ve got no sugary substrate to ferment but just their transitory presence was enough to regulate my skin in many ways — oiliness, inflammation, general glow.
It’s a bit of a big production but it was totally worth it for me.
Yeah, I noticed the less I wash my skin the better it is, same with number of products I use. The less the better. When I am on holidays (we have a seaside house) sometimes I don’t wash my face for weeks, just seawater… and my skin is really best.
I learned not washing is good for skin in my teens, I had really bad cystic acne outbreak for few months. My dermatologist did extraction, gave me antibiotic spray and said now just spray antibiotic and don’t wash your face for few weeks. And my acne magically cleared and never reappeared,
This sounds like a great cleanser. Do you still use it? What are the proportions, I assume you make it yourself.
Not only I make it myself, I used to sell at my indie skincare brand and my customers LOVED it so it wasn’t just an N=1 success (I stopped selling it because I hated the logistics so that’s another story).
The proportions vary depending on the consistency you like and the pourability from the chosen container so you can play with them. Start with filling 2/3 of a flask with grape seed oil. Pour enough colloidal oatmeal until it’s runny enough for your liking. Ideally add some rolled oats as a mild exfoliant. Since it’s water free it doesn’t even need a preservative and won’t go bad unless from oil oxidation (keep it in a dark cool place and it will last 2-3 months easily).
When I made it, because I was charging $ I went a bit fancier and added matcha powder, bit of turmeric, and activated charcoal with the idea that it could be used as a mask first which you’d then wash off.
But if you want just a basic cleanser, grape seed oil and colloidal oatmeal all by themselves is a killer combo.
And yes, ideally I wouldn’t wash my face like… AT ALL. But since I use moisturizers they would pile up and pill.
The water kefir hack is also really good if you want to go an extra step. If making it sounds like a pain in the ass, perhaps start by buying plain kombucha from the grocery store and spray that instead. The acidity and microbial metabolites do something really good to the face.
Also for moisturizers I swear by Gold Bond. Their stuff for DRY skin ironically works even better for oily skin in my experience. It’s greasy in a good way, like butter that just gets soaked in and disappears into dewiness.
Oh another hack for oily skin that deserves its own standalone comment. Get that colloidal oatmeal in a cosmetic container and get yourself a makeup brush — one of those big ones for applying loose powder. Soak up the colloidal oatmeal and powder your face with it over the sink. The excess will fall off but a residue will stick that is fucking amazing! It’s colorless but absorbs all oils and covers every pore and gives the face an instagram like filter appearance. I don’t even know how to describe it so just do yourself a favor and just do it and you’ll see what I mean.
I thought of this as a way to give my skin a starchy substrate to help the lactic acid producing bacteria in water kefir a chance to stick around my face post spray. But it made the face look crazy good.
Sounds great. I will make it and report back. Sometimes I feel my skin needs more than just water, maybe this will be the answer. I used to like a colloidal oatmeal peel/wash… but they stopped producing it and I used it once or twice weekly.
I was planning to start making this to drink. Might spay some on my face as well. Probably you can keep it in a spritz bottle for this purpose. In the fridge?
Love this! Will try, can you keep it on your face all day? I tried cornstarch in the same manner, but it gave me an perfect pallor mortis, I imagine oatmeal is more kind in this regard.
Depends on skin tone I suppose. I’m pretty fair but warm toned and it looks like a second skin on top of my skin — just changes texture and eliminates shine, no change of color at all.
The water kefir should be kept in the fridge for sure and I highly recommend a glass bottle for the spritz as the acidity can corrode plastic. The tube for the spray is plastic and that can’t be helped but at least the bottle itself won’t be.
Regarding Accutaine, I agree with medaura. Roche has had thousands of lawsuits from the bad side effects (seems most were dismissed). My wife took it for a couple of months many years ago and has had dry eye syndrome ever since. I’d stay away from it…
Yes, totally understand, but we are not talking full acne dose which is 1 mg/kg daily for few months. This is intermittent (twice weekly 0,5 mg/kg) dosing. I won’t try it any time soon. I will research some more and decide later. If I find anything of interest pro or con I will post it here.
It is a mixed bag. I think it is still worth considering. Maybe I can get a prescription and try it for few months and decide on the effect. I am not sure about doing it long term. Maybe like a 12 week course once a year? Isotretinoin is known to induce autophagy so maybe it might be beneficial in this regard as well. Seems that indirectly via upregulation of the expression of of the transcription factor p53 down regulates mTORC1. It is not looking that bad after all. I always thought that isotretinoin is a dangerous drug, but micro dosing, cycling and intermittent dosing might be possible and positive for skin aging.
(10-20 mg three times a week for 2 months, group A)
All patients treated with oral isotretinoin noted improvement in wrinkles, thickness and color of the skin, size of pores, skin elasticity, tone, and reduction in pigmented lesions and mottled hyperpigmentation. A statistically significant difference was found in the improvement of group A. Using minimal amounts of this drug, the side effects were practically negligible.
There was an improvement in the overall appearance of the skin, regarding texture, wrinkles depth and skintone. Skin thickness, suppleness, and pore size improved. Both the number of collagen fibers and the density of elastic fibers increased in the statistically significant manner. Elastosis decreased, the thickness of the epidermis increased, and the stratum corneum diminished. Reduction of pigmented lesions and uneven hyperpigmentation was detected. With low-dose isotretinoin, side effects were absent or negligible, limited to minimal lip dryness.
https://apcz.umk.pl/JEHS/article/view/41331
Clinically, patients, as well as the researching and the assessor physicians, noticed improvement in skin quality. One patient presented severe solar elastosis, 11 manifested the moderate form, while 8 presented the discreet type. According to histological analysis, 65% of the patients revealed alteration in the distribution and thickness of the elastic fibers, which can be interpreted as a histological improvement, while 60% showed an increase in collagen density. We observed an increase in collagen density, from 51.2% to 57.4%, (p=0.004). At the end of the 12-week follow-up period, this density decreased to 54.7% (p=0.050). There was an increase in the density of elastic fibers, from 26.5% to 31.3%, (p=0.02), which had dropped to 27.5% at the end of the 12-week follow-up period.
Clinical evaluation showed slight improvement; profilometry, corneometer and skin elasticity tests presented significant difference in pre/post values (P = 0.001 to 0.028), but no differences between A/B. Histological findings and p53 expression were comparable between groups before treatment (P > 0.1); microscopic analysis showed no differences between groups for most variables, after treatment. Slight but significant difference between A/B for p53 with major reduction post isotretinoin [0.66+/-0.31 vs. 0.94+/-0.34 respectively (P = 0.04) was observed. There were minor side effects and no significant laboratory test alterations. We concluded that no significant clinical, microscopic changes but p53 epidermal expression reduction were observed. The role of ultra-violet induced p53 mutation in skin carcinogenesis reinforces retinoids chemoprevention. Oral isotretinoin seemed safe but not effective to treat photoaging. Caution should be considered for women prone to pregnancy. Further controlled studies are necessary.
This is a good view on pros and cons of a dermatologist. It might not be better than topical tretinoin with less worrying about systemic effects. The benefits might be greater in people with really oily skin as systemic isotretinoin stops oil production.
Apologies if this is already addressed in the links as I didn’t follow them —- but did they run a control only against placebo or also against topical tret?
Basically I’m not seeing any evidence that systemic is better than topical.
