Psoriasis - dealing with having it on the face.

This isn't exactly a post that I've been looking forward to writing. Honestly, I hoped that I wouldn't have to, but after reading a comment on one of my looks saying that I should "take care of my acne" I felt like I had some explaining to do.

I've got psoriasis on my face and it sucks. There, I said it.

What it is

It's a common, incurable, but treatable skin disease. It's not contagious.
There are many different types of it, so try Googling it if you want to read more.

My skin

I've "suffered" from psoriasis for years but only just found out what it was about 8 months ago when it got worse and I got it on my forehead. Since then, I've had different treatments but none of them have had the desired results.
I've just been put on some new medication recently that I'm hoping will help, but I haven't seen any results yet and to be honest, my face is looking the worst it ever has.
For me, the worst part (obviously?) is that I have it on my face. I have some on my body as well, but it doesn't look nearly as bad, and I can always cover that up with clothes if I need to.

It really doesn't feel as bad as it looks, so my main problems are that it looks bad and that I'm much less interested in doing makeup on myself when my skin looks like this.

What it looks like

Basically, not pretty. I know that a lot of people suffering from the condition have it a whole lot worse than I do, but I'm still not a fan of the look of it on my face ;)

That's me - completely bare faced.

Why it's hard to cover up

We all know that discoloration in the skin is "easy" to cover up, but uneven texture makes it a lot harder to cover things up nicely.
The big problem is that with psoriasis I need to cover up both a lot of redness as well as some really, really dry skin. The redness can be covered quite easily but the smallest amount of makeup seems to emphasize the dryness of the spots making it nearly impossible to cover up completely.
You can see the dry patches on my forehead pretty clearly in this post, even though I did try to pick pictures that didn't show it off too much ;)

Covering it up as best as possible

Since it's the dry skin that makes it hard to cover, I try to moisturize my skin as well as possible in the night, usually with a salve or vaseline on the spots. This doesn't work wonders but it does make it a little less impossible to cover the spots in the morning.

Also, different primers that smoothes out the skin can be helpful, as well as using products that aren't dry or too matte looking.

However, as you can see in recent blog posts, I'm no where near being able to cover it up completely.

So far, the best products to cover it up for me has been:

• MAC Matte texture cream as a primer. This helps smooth out the skin a little so that the uneven texture isn't quite as noticeable when you apply foundation/concealer on top.
• MAC Pro Longwear concealer. I use this on the spots and try to blend it out without buffing too much on the dry skin. I use this because it gives decent coverage without looking too cakey or matte. Also, I like that it really is super long lasting so that I don't have to worry about it fading during the day.

Blog and tutorials

Since the psoriasis is quite bad on my face right now I really haven't wanted to make tutorials because of it. I try not to let the condition limit me, but I would just rather not deal with all the negative YouTube comments when it comes to something like this.

As far as the blog goes, I've tried to use pictures that don't show it off too much, but it has been noticeable, and what made me realize that I actually wanted to write this post was the comment about "taking care of my acne". Obviously(!) acne isn't even something you can simply "take care of" so I'm in no way saying that it's easier to deal with that.
However, I do think that there is a lot of great and helpful tips and advice on dealing with acne, whereas psoriasis seems to be more of a taboo subject.

I'm really not sure I'll have any FOTD pictures up before my skin clears up a bit, but we'll see.



Since psoriasis is a quite common skin condition - affecting up to 3% of all people - statistics say that some of you reading this have to deal with the condition too. If this post was helpful to just one person in any way, I'm more than happy that I wrote it, even though I've kept it as a draft for weeks not knowing whether or not to show my bare face ;)

Eyeliner Experiment

I'm out of eyeliner practice.
Luckily, playing around with a shape like this makes for a great exercise, and I ended up being quite happy with the way the look turned out :)

What are your favorite eyeliner looks to do?