Dr. Pimple Popper Knows You Can’t Look Away

Dr. Sandra Lee has seen it all, dermatologically speaking. A cyst as big as a grapefruit. A blackhead so large it looked like a worn penny. A benign fatty mass sticking out of a neck like a second head.

By comparison, the growth she was removing on a sunny California morning in December was small potatoes. Smaller than a potato, even: the size of a grape.

The patient of the moment, Mike Nixon, had traveled to Dr. Lee’s Inland Empire office for help with a bothersome bump on his head. Using a pair of scissors, Dr. Lee created an almond-shaped opening in Mr. Nixon’s mostly bald scalp. “You’re doing OK, right?” Dr. Lee asked. Numbed up, he replied succinctly, “Mm-hmm.”

A medical assistant stood behind Dr. Lee, filming on an iPhone attached to a stabilizing gimbal. In exchange for receiving permission to share footage of a procedure on social media, Dr. Lee sometimes provides patients with free merchandise and her signature skin care products.

The doctor widened the incision with her scissors, and a cyst came into view — a pilar cyst to be specific. Its texture, Dr. Lee explained, is just like that of an olive. Dr. Lee, 54, has a tendency to compare her patients’ growths to food. The contents of an epidermoid cyst can look like mashed potatoes. The sebum inside a steatocystoma is smoother, like custard. Such statements flow out of Dr. Lee, effortlessly.

“I like to pop ’em out whole because it’s a lot more satisfying that way,” Dr. Lee said in her characteristically perky tone.

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