- Dr. Pimple Popper treated a man with a cyst that was inches from his mouth.
- When she squeezed the cyst, it released a thick gray substance that she had to keep away from his mouth.
- She said her goal was to make the smallest incision possible to prevent scarring on the man's face.
In a recent video, Dr. Pimple Popper helped a man with a cheek cyst filled with chunky gray pus. The cyst's location, inches from the man's mouth, made the treatment precarious.
It was an epidermoid cyst, which occurs when skin cells burrow and multiply underneath the skin, according to the Mayo Clinic. Usually, epidermoid cysts grow slowly and aren't painful. But they're filled with a cheese-like pus that can smell and sometimes become inflamed, according to Dr. Pimple Popper, the dermatologist Sandra Lee.
Lee first covered the man's eyes with a cloth, leaving only his nose, mouth, and cheek showing. She also numbed the area with an injectable solution off-camera.
Then Lee used a blade to slice through the cyst's center. She said she made the incision as small as possible to avoid a large scar on the man's face.
Lee opened the incision further with scissors, then placed her thumb and index finger on either side of the growth, preparing to release its insides.
"I'm going to give it a little squeeze, like grandma is pinching your cheek," Lee told the man.
As soon as Lee applied pressure, a thick gray substance erupted from the incision in small chunks. She grabbed the pus, made up of trapped dead skin cells, and removed it from the man's cheek right away so it wouldn't come into contact with his mouth.
Her goal was to squeeze out as much of the cyst's innards as possible to avoid creating a deeper incision and a bigger scar.
There were some contents left, so Lee injected more numbing solution and used scissors and tweezers to remove the remaining bits.
Finally, she stitched up the incision so it could heal.