Believe it or not, there's an entire subculture of people really passionate about popping pimples.
Sandra Lee, a dermatologist in Southern California, calls them “popaholics” and their sickening yet somewhat intriguing obsession with watching others do the dirty deed “popaholicism”. And she’s giving them exactly what they want: “pops,” oozing blackheads, whiteheads and cysts of all sizes, shapes and colours.
Lee, a cosmetic and surgical dermatologist in Upland, better known as “Dr Pimple Popper”, has gained widespread attention on social media, where she has posted countless videos showing her removing poppable things from her patients’ bodies. Now she has her own show on TLC of the same name, with up-close and personal procedures on her patients.
“It’s fascinating to me why people love this stuff,” she said this week, explaining that people have told her that watching the videos relaxes and entertains them.
Since its premiere last week, which drew 2.4 million viewers, TLC’s Dr Pimple Popper has aired two episodes, showing several patients learning about their conditions and having various growths removed from their bodies.
“I think it’s going to capture the interest of more than just ‘popaholics’; it will convert people into ‘popaholicism’ because I think it shows a more well-rounded picture of what goes on,” Lee said about the show.
She said that “it’s not just about the ‘pops’ or the surgery” because it shows her patients’ journeys.
“It’s so interesting to me that this is all sort of starting on the grotesque, or something that is shocking or gross to so many people, but it ends up being a happy story,” she added.
But why would people watch this?
Heather Berlin, a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, said that “evolutionarily speaking, it’s normal behaviour to want to remove bumps from your skin” because those bumps could be parasites or other things, so she said it makes sense that human beings evolved in a way that such behaviour can be pleasurable to them.
For some, Berlin said, popping pimples or watching others do it stimulates the nucleus accumbens, the reward centre in the brain that receives dopamine and gives people “a little hit of pleasure”. But to others who may find the behaviour disgusting, a different part of the brain called the insular cortex is activated.
Lee said she realised that there was a market for pimple-popping videos several years ago when she created an Instagram page, “a little window into my world as a dermatologist”. She said her page had not attracted any significant attention until she posted a video of a blackhead extraction. People went nuts. “I thought that was very strange so I did it again, and the same thing happened.”
Lee said she discovered a subculture on the internet, where people had shared tens of thousands of videos showcasing their best pimple pops.
The videos typically showed people “in their backyard or in their garage or living room and they had dirty fingernails, no gloves and paper towels, and dogs barking and beer bottles half-opened and people screaming and no anaesthetic and things like that,” she said.
She said she saw an opportunity to provide similar videos, but in a safe and sterile environment, so she started recording more extractions and even surgeries.
“I knew not everybody likes popping,” she said. “I think you get the opposite ends of the spectrum - people who are obsessed with it and people who are disgusted by it. But that’s how it grew, too, because either way, people would tag their friends to show them and that’s how it got bigger.”
Lee has gained a massive audience on social media - 4million on YouTube, 2million on Facebook, 91000 on Twitter and 39000 on Instagram.
But the decision to show it all on TV was not so easy.
Howard Lee, president and general manager of TLC, said though the dermatologist had become an online phenomenon, network executives questioned how her world would be seen on TV.
He said they “had to have a real discussion about whether we wanted to try it out on air”.
“We absolutely had concerns. We didn’t know whether what Dr Lee does for a living would turn off viewers,” he said.
Now that the show has aired, the president said: “Dr Lee has been embraced by her audience.”
Lee said she remained surprised by how she became Dr Pimple Popper, a brand that has led to a skin-care line, a TV show and, soon, a game. “This is bonkers, just bonkers,” she said, but added: "It’s also “special. I feel honoured and humbled by it.”