18 hours ago
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Well|She Kept Her Condition Secret for Decades, Then Bared It All Online.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/18/well/skin-hair-picking-dermatillomania.html
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Millions of people compulsively pick their skin or pull their hair. Social media is helping some of them to recover.
Chloe Shakin interviewed nearly a dozen individuals with BFRBs, and experts who specialize in their treatment, for this article.
April 18, 2025Updated 1:10 p.m. ET
Sarah Redzikowski tilted her head and leaned closer to her phone camera, examining the redness that spread from her cheekbones to her chin. She traced her fingers over her swollen skin and sobbed, placing her face in her hands.
“I hate that I do this to myself,” she said softly.
Ms. Redzikowski, 40, was talking to her TikTok followers about a secret she had kept hidden from even her closest friends and family for decades: Since age 12, she has compulsively picked her skin, often to the point that it bleeds and scars. As desperately as she wants to quit, Ms. Redzikowski, who has a mental health condition called dermatillomania, simply cannot stop.
She estimates that she spends at least two hours per week scraping at the skin on her face — and her scalp, arms, back, chest and legs. “I’ve spent at least 125 days of my life bent over a mirror,” she said in the video. “And that’s 125 days I’ll never get back.”
She wiped her eyes and squirted cleanser onto her palms, massaging it over her face until it started to foam. Then she began the familiar routine of trying to repair the damage she had done. She waved a high-frequency wand over the constellation of lesions on her cheeks, willing them to heal faster. She slathered her face in spot treatments and serums.
Still, her skin was angry, bleeding in some places. And she was angry with herself.
“It’s an internal battle, because I do know it’s not my fault, and I’m not wanting to do this,” she said in an interview. “But it is my hand. I did do the damage.”
People with dermatillomania or other conditions like it, such as uncontrollable hair pulling or nail biting — which are known as body-focused repetitive behaviors, or BFRBs — can feel a sense of shame so debilitating, they will not admit to the behaviors even in anonymous surveys, medical experts said. After all, it’s their fingers plucking strands of hair, their nails digging into their skin.
