Pop goes the ...
Dermatologist Dr. Pimple Popper stars in the grossest show on TV
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 by the same name — providing a deeper dive into her patients’ lives and the up-close and personal procedures she performs on them.
“It’s fascinating to me why people love this stuff,” Lee said, explaining that people have told her that watching the videos relaxes and entertains them.
Since its première, which drew some 2.4 million U.S. 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 — something she does not typically get to see.
“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 said about the show.
But why would people watch that?
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 people, 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, she said, to others, the behaviour may seem disgusting; in those cases, she said, a different part of the brain called the insular cortex is activated.
So why do some people find it pleasing and others repulsive? That, Berlin said, is not known. Lee said she realized that there was a market for pimple-popping videos several years ago when she created an Instagram page as “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,” she said, “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 anesthetic and things like that,” she said. So, 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 — four million on YouTube, two million on Facebook, 91,000 on Twitter and 39,000 on Instagram.