I haven’t read your previous posts, so sorry if this is not helpful.
You have other options aside from going to see a dermatologist. (Although having one skin check under your belt is not the worst idea).
You can buy Differin retinoid OTC and it’s similar to tret, but not quite as good. I think this should be under $30
Any doc can give you an rx for tret, so just ask your primary doc. I’ve never been refused, but I’m sure there are jerks out there
You can use a strong otc retinol and get similar results, but they are weaker so they will just take you a lot longer to get there.
You can choose an online service, like Curology (I use them) and you pay them for the rx and product which is then sent to your house. I happen to prefer their formula because I get less irritation.
To your point, I didn’t age until I was 55-ish, and then I fell off a cliff!
I’m about due for a meeting with my concierge doctor to get a yearly blood test and physical. I’ll ask about Tretinoin. (My guess is that she will refer me to a dermatologist. She did offer to prescribe me Metformin once, and I turned her down. She was educated at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine, so maybe knows Nir Barzilai. She, herself, takes Rapamycin, and is really into anti-aging. Though, she’s also reluctant suggest medicines to lower blood pressure and cholesterol, which is a bit strange.)
If you have a concierge doc who refuses to write you an rx for tret, I’d look at her and say ‘buh bye’. And if she is concierge, just call the office and tell them you want this, you don’t have to wait for a meeting for something like tret.
And a doc who takes rapa but reluctant to address bp and lipids would make me question her. Meaning, she is obviously very proactive in her own longevity, but is she is not as concerned with the longevity of her patients… just something I would ask her to explain because you have to trust her on topics you might not already know the answers to (if not concierge, there are many other factors like time/money, so they get more leeway).
I had a gyn visit a few months ago and she said she didn’t have time to answer my questions, but when I was in the parking lot, she called my doc to ask about the rapa I’m taking and now she is going to take it…. I told him, that’s nice she had time to learn from me for her own health, but no time to answer my questions, now find me a new gyn.
Yes - it’s really easy and cheap to add a dozen or two dozen tubes of tretinoin to an existing medications order, if you’re already ordering from India. And it sounds like people are getting deliveries again now…
Are they? I’m almost out of tret and need to reorder soon but have been nervous. Do things seem to be back to normal delivery wise? And dousing FedEx / dhl seem to help or hurt?
Shipments are going out, but I don’t have a good feel for the % getting through right now. I don’t think they are “back to normal” from the sounds of things. I don’t know about using FedEx/DHL.
I can’t imagine going back to needing to do a sales pitch to a doctor to get a referral to an expensive specialist to do a sales pitch to them to get the specific medication I want to try out to see if it’s right for me.
You can get a prescription for tret on Amazon pharmacy in about an hour without having to actually see a doctor - just answer a few questions online. It costs about $20
Students and dermatologists at Penn set out to discover how rosemary and its extract could heal damaged skin without leaving scars.
The growing social media craze promoting rosemary and rosemary extract in skincare routines now has scientific evidence to support it. Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania report in JCI Insight that a natural compound found in rosemary leaves could play a key role in improving wound healing and reducing the formation of scars.
“Many skin injuries end in scars, and in some people, it can lead to long-term cosmetic and even functional issues,” said senior author Thomas Leung, MD, PhD, an associate professor of Dermatology at Penn. “Our findings suggest that rosemary extract, and specifically the antioxidant, carnosic acid, can shift the healing process from scarring to healthy skin regeneration. We don’t have proven ways to consistently do that in humans.”
Conducting the research in mice, the researchers made cream with carnosic acid, a naturally occurring antioxidant mostly existing in rosemary, to accelerate wound closure and restore hair follicles, oil glands, and cartilage. They also found that a particular nerve sensor in the skin previously identified as essential to scarless healing, TRPA1, was critical for stimulating the healing in this instance, too. When tested in mice without the TRPA1 sensor, which previous research from Leung showed is responsible for scarless healing, carnosic cream lost its impact.
The researchers also found a localized effect from rosemary; scarless healing only occurred when carnosic acid cream was applied to the site of the injury, but not when it was applied to skin far from the wound.
Research Paper:
Reference: “Carnosic acid in topical rosemary extract enhances skin repair via TRPA1 activation” by Emmanuel Rapp, Jiayi Pang, Borna Saeednia, Stephen Marsh Prouty, Christopher A. Reilly and Thomas H. Leung, 23 October 2025, JCI Insight. DOI: 10.1172/jci.insight.196267
The Silicon Valley Skin-Care Brand Biohackers Are Obsessed With
OneSkin, all over TikTok, merges the beauty industry’s fixation with antiaging and tech’s fantasy of halting death.
Amid snail slime serums, pulsed-light hair removal gadgets and Korean sunscreens on TikTok, a new kind of skin-care product is making the rounds. In one video, a white-coated scientist pipettes pink liquid into vials. In another, on Instagram, a woman with glittery ombre nails unboxes black-and-white bottles filled with futuristic youth serum. “Welcome to your skin-health and longevity journey,” the packaging reads.
If the pitch sounds more Palo Alto than Paris, that’s because it is. OneSkin, begun by four Ph.D.s in a San Francisco biotech accelerator, is now a skin-care brand sitting at the intersection of beauty’s obsession with antiaging and Silicon Valley’s fixation with outfoxing death. The company’s lotions and serums, “proven to target a root cause of aging,” have attracted a fan base that includes a who’s who of tech, biohacking and wellness types.
The OneSkin thing is pretty interesting. I ordered 3 bottles, so I’ll test it myself. But if you look at the paper, and if you believe it, you basically have efficacy similar to over-the-counter retinol products. That’s not bad, and it seems to work through a different mechanism, where they can likely be stacked. However, it’s not a game-changer, and would still be easily out-performed by basic Adapalene or tretinoin.
However, it’s still a peptide and they don’t cross the skin very well. In their newsletter, the OneSkin company basically strongly allude to using micro needling to enhance permeability, but they can’t outright advise it, so they say “many people are doing it this way” and similar statements.
I’m looking forward to hearing about your experience with it. I’ve seen they have a body lotion which is tempting, but I keep assuming it must be a gimmick and no better than the other million peptide lotions out there.
In the meantime, I just bought a red light panel and am HOPING this was not a big fat waste of time/money and really does work on our skin/hair
The OS-01 peptide is a senolytic, very different from retinol products in function.
I plan to order some FOX04-DRI next month to do a skin experiment with micro needling. This is a “universal” senolytic and acts on all types of senescent cells. I’ve used it before for a systemic cycle but I’m interested to see if a targeted delivery to the epidermis and dermis layers.
It looks like it’s a derivitive of another peptide called OS-01 and is a proprietray version that seems to be protected by “secrecy” kind of like the Colonels secret recipe.
