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Info on myTCA peel and PIPs
Several people have been interested in my experience with the TCA peel, so I thought I'd post about my experience. I used a 15% peel from Skin Obsession.
I achieved no frosting on the first layer, which stayed on for five minutes, so per the instructions I applied a second layer. The first layer didn't burn much, but you can see in the pic below that my eyes watered from the sting of the second layer. It wasn't horribly uncomfortable, though. A light frost almost immediately showed up on my cheeks and in between my brows after applying the second layer. I considered neutralizing only the frosted areas, but to be safe I went ahead and rinsed my entire face. I patted dry and applied Cetaphil moisturizer.
Pic of Day 1 - application. You can see light frosting on my cheek. My skin turns red very easily, so I fully expected it to turn red during the peel, which it did.
Day 2 - I looked pretty normal, but my skin was tight. Here you see that when I smiled, the layer of dead/dry skin would crinkle up.
I started to peel a little at the end of Day 2. Day 3 and 4 were when I was nastiest looking. Below is a picture of my skin at it's worst. There were never any huge chunks of skin peeling off my face, but my skin was tight and flaking. I didn't go anywhere on day 3 or 4. What looks like bad wrinkles under my eyes in the pic below is due to the dry layer of skin that hadn't yet peeled.
On day 5 the peeling was minimal and not noticable as long as I used plenty of moisturizer. Today is day 6, and I only have a few small spots where the skin is still flaking a bit. I have no makeup on in the pic below. The red flush is how my skin is normally colored and isn't due to the peel.
The heaviest flaking occurred where I frosted - on my upper cheeks and between the brows. I did also have flaking skin on my nose, forehead, chin and near my mouth. The cheek area close to my nose and up toward my eyes never flaked, but did get a bit dry, so I imagine that dry skin did slough off as it is no longer dry in those areas.
As far as the results, it's not anything amazing, but I also didn't expect that. Next time I'm only going to neutralize the frosted spots and leave the other parts of my face alone until they frost or the time is up. The most noticeable difference is that my skin is now very, very soft. I do think it lightened my freckles a bit, but not enough that anyone else would notice. I've read that the best results are typicaly obtained by doing a series of peels, so I'm going to do the 15% once a month, which the instructions say is the appropriate spacing between peels, and see what happens. I really had two days of downtime, and this was my biggest worry about the peel, so I think I can do the application on a Thursday evening and be presentable by Monday.
I really would like the peel to help with the fine lines under my eyes, but don't know that this will happen at this strength. After several months at the 15%, I may move up in strength just for the under eye area (I don't do the area right under my eyes, though).
Re: Info on myTCA peel and PIPs
Thanks for the update!
For others that are reading, I did mine the same night but with a 12.5% TCA peel from makeupartistschoice.com. I had a bit of frosting immediately occur at the tip of my nose. I neutralized that area immediately.
I also had somewhat dry skin before it started peeling. I applied bactracin twice a day on days 1 and 2 and it helped tremendously. I basically started flaking about the end of day 2, but very very light. If I moisturized well, it wasn't that noticeable. But forget foundation/powder at any point. It just magnified any dryness. (My instructions said no makeup when skin is peeling.) Today was the worst for me. I looked like I was recovering from a mild sunburn. No big flakes of skin but it was really noticeable until I moisturized. Not knowing my skin's reaction, I did it during my vacation. But next time I would consider doing it during a normal work week.
My application had hardly any stinging. It was considerably less than my glycolic peels. I only did one application. If you do an additional layer, you are essentially making your peel 25% stronger. So my 12.5% peel would have actually been about 15.5% had I done that. (12.5%+(12.5%x25%))
I can't speak to much improvement yet but I know TCA peels aren't immediate. My instructions state to evaluate at about day 10. I do notice one of my acne scars (it looked like a "ice pick" scar) is less noticeable but I can't say if it's because of this or the past 4 weekly glycolic peels I've been doing, or a combination of both.
I was hoping you would update! It's good to know about the 10 days, and my instructions didn't mention that. The peeling on my forehead and by my mouth have been very much like the peeling from a mild sunburn. I can't remember - did you also prep with Retin-A? I expected to look a lot worse than I did, and wonder if it was the prep that kept me from looking extremely nasty.