The Wellness Edit™

Still finding new ones after having them frozen? Here’s why, and what’s finally working for women who’ve tried everything.

I started looking into this after an email from a reader. She’s 72, she’s had seborrheic keratoses for eleven years, and she’s had dozens frozen.

“I keep finding new ones,” she wrote. “Every time I reach back there, my fingers find another one. My doctor tells me it’s just the nature of them. Do I have to accept that?”

It’s Not a Spot Problem

She’d been having them frozen twice a year, at $100 to $250 a visit. Every appointment cleared the spots she had that day, and by the next one, new ones had already started showing up in other places.

The spots were never the real problem. Something underneath kept making them, and freezing never touched it, so there was always going to be a next one.

Why They Keep Coming Back

I took her email to a dermatology nurse with 20 years in a skin clinic.

Your skin is always renewing itself, she told me. New keratin, the protein your outer skin is made of, comes up from underneath, and the old keratin on top flakes away.

In a seborrheic keratosis, that shedding stops. The old keratin piles up and hardens into a crust on top, the rough, raised part you can see and feel, while underneath, the keratin keeps building up and pushing it back up.

And it rarely stops at one spot, which is why new ones keep showing up next to the old ones.

“Think of a callus,” she said. “It’s hardened keratin too. Sand the top off and it grows right back, because nothing touched what’s building it underneath.”

Why One at a Time Can’t Keep Up

Freezing takes off the crust you can see, but the build-up underneath is still there, so a few weeks later it pushes a new crusty top in the same place.

Freeze sprays are the same idea, just weaker, and they can blister the healthy skin around the spot.

Wart removers have salicylic acid, one of the right ingredients, but they’re gone long before they can work through the crust. 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, one spot at a time, and none of them touch the build-up underneath or the ones just starting. That’s why she kept finding new ones.

What It Actually Takes

If the problem keeps happening, the answer has to keep happening too: something that works on the build-up underneath, on every spot at once, every day. The nurse said it takes three things working together.

Glycolic acid, to loosen the crust so your skin can shed it.

Salicylic acid, to get through the crust to the build-up underneath. “That’s the one that matters,” she said. “It’s oil-soluble, so it passes through the waxy crust instead of sitting on top of it, and breaks down the build-up.”

And the part everyone misses: time. A cream or lotion is absorbed into your skin within a minute, so the acids are gone before they can do much. To loosen the build-up, they need to stay on the spot for hours.

So why had nobody told my reader? “Because the visit is built around freezing,” the nurse said. “Both acids have been used on calluses for years, but nobody sends you home with anything for the build-up underneath.”

That’s when it clicked for me. She’d been fighting a problem that happens every day with a fix that happens twice a year.

The Piece That Was Missing

I asked the nurse if anything did all three.

“One does,” she said. “It’s called the Smooth & Even body stick, by Fora.”

It has both acids in a shea butter base that doesn’t soak in, so it holds them on the spots for hours. And because you glide it over the whole area after your shower, it works on every spot there at once, including the ones just starting.

Smooth & Even Body Stick by Fora

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What Happened Next

Eight weeks after I sent her the nurse’s answer, my reader wrote back.

“I almost didn’t try it. I figured it would end up in the drawer with everything else. For two weeks I couldn’t see a thing, but the rough ones along my bra strap felt smooth. By week six, the big one on my shoulder was flat.

“But what I noticed most was what I didn’t find. I ran my hand across my back the way I do every night, and for the first time in years, there wasn’t a new one.”

She hasn’t booked a freezing appointment since. And she wasn’t the only one.

What Women Are Saying

More than 64,000 women have ordered it, and 3,700 have left a review.

What Women Ask Before Ordering

The Bottom Line

My reader spent eleven years removing them one at a time. It was never going to be enough, because it was never a spot problem, and once she started working on the build-up underneath, she stopped finding new ones.

The ones that haven’t shown up yet are the ones you can still catch.

It has sold out nine times this year, and each time it took up to two months to come back, which meant two more months of finding new ones. Right now it’s in stock at $24, with 60 days to try it or get every dollar back.