Why fans love ‘Dr. Pimple Popper,’ TV’s grossest show

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 colors.

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.

Since its premiere, which drew some 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 wellrounded picture of what goes on,” Lee said about the show.

“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 behavior 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 behavior can be pleasurable to them.

For some people, Berlin said, popping pimples or watching others do it stimulates the nucleus accumbens, the reward center in the brain that receives dopamine and gives people “a little hit of pleasure.”

Lee said she realized that there was a market for pimplepopping 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 has gained a massive audience on social media — 4 million on YouTube, 2 million on Facebook, 91,000 on Twitter and 39,000 on Instagram.

But the decision to show it all on TV was not so easy.

Howard Lee, president and general manager of TLC, said that though the dermatologist had become an online phenomenon, network executives questioned how her world would be seen on television.

“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 is still surprised by how she became Dr. Pimple Popper — a brand that has led to a skin-care line, a television show and, soon, a game.

“This is bonkers — just bonkers,” she said. But, she said, it’s also “special.” “I feel honored and humbled by it,” she said.