Review: Bye-Bye Blemish Drying Lotion

Ever wish you had a cure-all sort of one-step zit minimizer? Something that could work within one night, and not something you had to wait forever on?

This is the product, ladies and gentlemen.

Not to sound like a commercial ad script, Bye-Bye Blemish Drying Lotion is quite interesting. It basically is a spot-treatment product that you use overnight and dries up acne pimples.

I remember finding a similar product, Mario Badescu's Drying Lotion, on a Youtube video by Secretlifeofabionerd:

This product looks really similar, a 1 oz bottle of clear liquid with pink stuff on the bottom:

I had really wanted to get Mario Badescu's product, but because it was $18 for a measly 1 oz of product, I looked for alternatives.

Thus, I found Bye-Bye Blemish Drying Lotion, which is basically just the same thing except at about 1/2 the price (I bought it for $9.75 online; you can buy it in packs of 3 on Amazon.com for about $22, roughly a little over $7 per bottle)

Here are the ingredients for the original Mario Badescu product:

INGREDIENTS: Isopropyl Alcohol,Deionized Water (Aqua), Calamine, Camphor, Colloidal Sulfur, Salicylic Acid,Glycerine, Zinc Oxide, Titanium Dioxide, Talc

And here are the ones for Bye-Bye Blemish's alternative:
Active Ingredients: Sulfur (10%) (Purpose: Acne Treatment)

Inactive Ingredients: Isopropyl Alcohol, Water (Aqua), Zinc Oxide, Salicylic Acid, Camphor, Aluminum Magnesium Silicate, Iron Oxide (CI 77491)

As you can see, they basically use just about the same ingredients. I bought this around the time I got really bad acne last semester, toward end of November-December 2012. Thus, I thought, why not give it a try?

Well, I think it was a good idea.

The instructions for using it were on the bottle as well as shown in the YT tutorial above from Secretlifeofabionerd - basically you let the pink stuff settle, and you use a q-tip to dip into the pink solution and pull it out. You dab it onto the spots onto your face and set it overnight. The next morning, wash it off.

Results? Pretty darn good.

Pros:

• Helped control my acne
• Got rid of/shriveled up acne spots
• May have even prevented future acne from popping up so rampantly

Cons:

• Really dries out your face
• Some skin types may be very sensitive to the (potentially burning) sulfur-alcohol-salicylic acid solution
• Terrible, strong sulfur smell
• Actually took several days (rather than one night) for the solution to fully work

Personally, I didn't mind the smell, and I combated the dryness with very emollient gel lotions and sunscreens.

I actually really liked this product. I think I'm going to repurchase this - perhaps even in packs of 3 on Amazon!

I would definitely recommend this product to people with oily and/or combination skin, particularly for acne-prone skin. I probably would not recommend it for people with sensitive skin or dry skin. Be sure to get that pink stuff - the calomine lotion soothes the skin against the strong sulfur, salicylic acid, and alcohol.

Ideally one could probably DIY this product with calomine lotion and concentrates of salicylic acid. However, I would probably advise against it in the case of this product because it seems like this combination of chemicals could potentially be unstable, and it would be a good idea to get the "safe" product that was already manufactured to stay together longer.

I definitely feel this product is worth the money paid, and then maybe even some! Highly recommended =D

Sources: 1 / 2