I’ve spent twenty years as a dermatology nurse, and I couldn’t tell you how many seborrheic keratoses I’ve frozen.
What I remember more is how often the same women came back. Every season they were more worn down by it, and every season there were more of them. They’d done everything they were told, and they’d heard what I used to tell them: they’re harmless, and it’s just the nature of them.
Harmless is true. “There’s nothing more you can do” isn’t. This is what I tell my patients now.
Why They Keep Coming Back
Your skin is always renewing itself. New keratin, the protein your outer skin is made of, comes up from underneath, and the old keratin on top flakes away every day without you noticing.
In a seborrheic keratosis, that shedding stops in one spot. The old keratin has nowhere to go, so it piles up and hardens into a crust on top. That crust is the rough, raised part you can see and feel.
But the crust isn’t the real problem. Underneath it, the keratin keeps building up and pushes the crust back up. That build-up underneath is what the spot grows back from.
It works a lot like a callus on your foot. A callus is hardened keratin too, and if you only sand down the top, it comes right back, because nothing touched what was building it underneath in the first place.
What Freezing, Sprays and Wart Removers All Miss
Freezing at the dermatologist takes off the crust you can see. But the build-up underneath is still there, so a few weeks later it pushes up a new crusty top in the same exact place, and new ones keep showing up right beside it.
Freeze sprays are the same idea as freezing, just weaker. They’re nowhere near as cold as what your dermatologist uses, so they barely touch the crust, and they can blister the healthy skin around the spot.
Wart removers have salicylic acid in them, which is one of the right ingredients. The problem is how long it stays there. A wart remover is dabbed on and dries or wipes off long before it can work its way through the crust. These spots don’t come apart in one go. Like a callus, the build-up has to be loosened a little at a time, for hours, day after day.
Every one of them works on the crust on top. None of them touch the build-up underneath, and that’s why they keep coming back.
What I Tell My Patients Now
Once I understood that, I stopped asking, “How do I get this spot off?” and started asking, “How do I stop what’s building it underneath?” The answer came down to three things working together.
First, something to loosen the crust on top. That’s glycolic acid. It loosens the crust so your skin can finally shed it.
Second, something that gets through the crust to the build-up underneath. That’s salicylic acid, and this is the part that matters. Salicylic acid is oil-soluble, so instead of sitting on the crusty top like most things do, it passes through it and breaks down the build-up underneath. Everything you’ve tried so far has stayed on top. This gets down to where the spot grows back from.
And third, the part everyone misses: time. Both acids need hours on the spot to loosen the build-up. But most creams and lotions are absorbed into your skin within a minute, and the acids disappear with them before they’ve had a chance to work.
That’s where shea butter comes in. Shea doesn’t soak in. It sits on the spot and holds both acids there for hours.
So why hasn’t your dermatologist told you any of this? It isn’t a secret. Podiatrists have used these same two acids on calluses for years, and a callus is made of the same hardened keratin.
But when you walk into a dermatologist’s office with seborrheic keratoses, the visit is built around taking off the ones that bother you, and freezing is the fastest way to do that. Nobody sends you home with anything for the build-up underneath.
When I put it all together, I’ll admit I got excited. For twenty years, I’d been taking the tops off. But here was a way to finally work on the part underneath, at home, on every spot at once, every single day.
So I went looking for one thing that did all three. The one I found, and the one I recommend now, is the Smooth & Even body stick by Fora. It has both acids in a shea butter base, in a stick. You glide it over the area after your shower, get dressed, and it keeps working on the spots for hours.
What Happened When My Patients Tried It
The first patient I told about it was Margaret. She’s 71, and she’d been having them frozen every spring and fall for six years, at about $200 a visit. She told me straight out that she expected it to be a waste of money.
Two weeks later, she called the clinic. Nothing looked any different yet, she said, but the rough ones along her bra line had gone smooth under her fingers.
At her next skin check, six weeks in, the big one on her shoulder blade, the one we’d frozen three times, had gone flat. It wasn’t gone yet, but it was flat, and when I checked the rest of her back, there wasn’t a single new one.
She cancelled her spring freezing appointment, and the first thing she said was that she wished someone had told her six years ago.
She wasn’t the only one.
What Other Women Are Saying
More than 64,000 women have ordered it, and 3,700 have left a 5-star review.
What Women Ask Before Ordering
My Advice
For twenty years, I told women it’s just the nature of them. I don’t say that anymore, because it never was. Margaret’s spot came back after three freezings, and it went flat once something finally worked on the build-up underneath.
Every month the build-up is left alone, it keeps building. The ones that haven’t shown up yet are the ones you can still catch.
My patients tell their sisters and their friends about it, and so do thousands of other women. That’s why it has sold out nine times this year, and each time, the next batch took up to two months to arrive. If you want to try it, I’d get it while it’s here.
Right now it’s in stock, at $24. Give it 60 days, and if it doesn’t work for you, you get every dollar back.