Over the holiday break my mom and I watched Dr. Pimple Popper on TLC together. We saw the on screen listing, were like “what the hell, we may as well” and then got alternately mesmerized and disgusted. I’d seen her YouTube videos but my mom had never heard of her. My mom even watched a few more episodes on her own! The best part is Dr. Sandra Lee’s easy rapport with her patients. She has a reassuring way of chatting that makes you think she’s the best doctor ever. For the uninitiated, Dr. Lee is a dermatologist who removes cysts, giant blackheads and massive pimples. She got famous with YouTube videos of extractions, which can be hard to watch and hard to stop watching. Dr. Lee doesn’t charge her patients if their insurance doesn’t cover it and they’re willing to be featured on video. (She doesn’t show their faces on YouTube in most cases.)

Rich Juzwiak from Jezebel got to interview her! He said she’s just as charming outside the office and he delightfully called her “humble as a curly fry.” I love that line! His piece was so fun to read. Dr. Lee has a new book she’s promoting called Put Your Best Face Forward: The Ultimate Guide to Skincare from Acne to Anti-Aging. She also has a skincare line and a line of extraction tools. (I got my teenager this extraction set off Amazon for much cheaper and they work well. You just have to remember to sterilize them. I learned about these extraction tools from Dr. Lee’s videos)

On her rapport with her patients
“That’s how I speak to my patients and I think that’s part of what’s endearing, that I don’t talk down to them,” said Dr. Lee. “I speak to them like I’m their girlfriend or their family member and that’s part of the trust I think that’s generated there.”

She was told her extractions are like watching horror movies
“I hate horror movies,” she responded. “I cannot watch any of them. My husband has been pissed at me before because he’ll rent a movie and it ends up being somewhat scary and I’m like, ‘Ah, I cannot watch it, we have to turn it off!’ Flowers in the Attic, that kind of thing, I feel like that could really happen. Someone could live up there and torment me. I don’t like to be scared.”

On if she considers her videos art
She told me early on as she was editing a video of “a gentleman who had [clogged pores] within the creases of his forehead and you just take them out and they’re lined up like little ants almost,” she found herself mesmerized and kept rewatching a certain sequence of frames. She finally concluded that what sucked her in was the very beauty of the human body, or that particular part of that particular body that she then effectively squeezed the beauty out of.

On if she makes the videos for shock value
“It’s people’s lives,” she said, refuting the notion that she’s out to shock. “If you have a cyst, that’s you’re life and a lot of us have it. I normalize it. People understand that it’s okay, that you’re a normal person with these sorts of things. The show has really made me… what has been so worthwhile about it is that it’s really shown me what kind of effect I can have on people. Maybe it’s the show being all fluffy, like, ‘She’s changed my life,’ but I don’t really see that. I just send people home. If they have sutures maybe they come back for like five minutes.”

[From Jezebel]

Dr. Lee clearly enjoys getting all the puss out, which is disgusting to explain like that, but it’s true. There are people who don’t mind gore and things some of us consider disgusting, but who hate being scared. Kaiser is like that! She is ok with those CSI and true crime type stories but hates horror movies. I’m the opposite. I’d rather be scared and see fake zombie or violence gore than real medical gore. I can still watch it, it just grosses me out. The main thing I learned from this interview is that Dr. Lee is the real deal and that she’s just as relatable and nice to journalists as she is to her patients. Also that she has a husband, a dermatologist who works with her at her practice. I haven’t seen him on the show or in her videos and it turns out that he’s camera shy and doesn’t even watch her videos at all. It’s probably a good thing that he’s not on the show as reality shows can really strain a relationship.