My Preoccupation With Blackhead Extraction Videos as Understood in Various Personal, Social, and Spiritual Contexts

(Unpublished, 2022)

Last night, I spent five and a half hours watching blackhead extraction videos on YouTube. It does not feel good to admit this, but it felt excellent to do it.

I’ve become a craven being. Last month, to thwart myself, I adjusted the settings on my phone so I could only watch 90 minutes of YouTube per day. Now I watch 90 minutes of YouTube per day on my phone, and hours more on my laptop.

The first step to solving my problem is to acknowledge it, which is why I’ve put off this reckoning so assiduously. I don’t want to quit watching blackhead extractions. Furthermore, I’ve been ashamed to own up to what I’ve been doing, and I think that’s appropriate. I’m proud to be ashamed. If I’m going to be a disgrace, at least I can loathe myself for it.

In order to understand, and thereby to overcome, my maladaptive behavior,[1] I propose to analyze its complex aspects through the lenses of various modalities.

Defining the subject of inquiry:

Blackhead extraction videos are videos that show the process of removing unwanted substances (debris, pus, dead skin cells, keratin, etc.) from the pores of the skin.

These videos may be live-action or animated, real or faked[2], professional or amateur, seconds or hours in length. The subcategory on which I am concentrating is live-action videos of a professional esthetician extracting the contents of clogged pores from the face and/or body of a real person.

In these videos, the client lies on a padded table under clinical lights, their blemishes and pustules unshadowed. The esthetician sits on a rolling chair and looks at the client’s skin through magnifying eyeglasses as they work.

They express the contents of the client’s blocked pores by a variety of methods: squeezing the skin to force out the impacted matter, poking the head of the blemish with a needle or scalpel and using the implement to extract the insides, and/or using specialized fine-tipped tweezers or clippers to pluck filaments of sebum from pores, leaving lurid, ragged-edged holes on display.

The videos are shot close-up with zoom lenses. Often, the client is seen only as an anonymous, genderless field of skin, and only the gloved thumb of the esthetician appears.

The most popular YouTube channels in this niche are produced by spas in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and surrounding countries. Their top videos routinely rack up millions of views. The amount of pirating of original footage for repackaging suggests that there is significant money to be made from the international audience of viewers, who leave comments in alphabets from around the world.

In the context of my deepest beliefs regarding the purpose of life:

How should a person live their life so that they express the fullest gratitude for their existence? This, I believe, is the fundamental question life asks of us, and we answer with our every breath, every thought, every action. Everything we do measures our love of being alive.

To do good in the world, and to alleviate suffering: I believe these are the most worthwhile uses of one’s life. I don’t think there’s anything a human can do that is more divine than to give love, love meaning time, energy, presence, thought, and feeling. Thus, ideally, one’s entire waking day would be spent in full engagement with the world, in appreciation of the gift of existence.

How, then, does watching five and a half hours of blackhead extraction videos fulfill that goal?

It does not. It does no good and helps no one.

Not only is this a perverse squandering of my time alive, it’s also a criminal waste of Earth’s dwindling resources, not to mention my own abilities and privilege. It’s an affront to have so much time and spend it so profligately. It’s like lighting money on fire.

An infinity of coincidences had to occur for me to exist. The horseshoe crab had to crawl onto land, my great-grandfather had to emigrate from Austria in 1898, a successful resolution to the Bay of Pigs Invasion had to be negotiated, etc. I know that all these things did not happen just so I could blow off my not-difficult job of writing books to watch hours of blackhead extraction videos.

In sum, I am living a false and hypocritical existence, betraying my core values, choosing to spend my limited, precious life-time staring at YouTube rather than making the world a more loving and beloved place.

In the context of my history of addiction:

Before I found blackhead videos, I was already an addict many times over. I’ve relied on cannabis to regulate my mood since I was 15 years old, and I am now more than thrice that age. At various times in my past, I have been addicted to cocaine, shopping, sudoku, and calling my ex-boyfriend late at night from a payphone on the street, then hanging up when he answered. I recognize the way I clench my jaw while watching videos from my cocaine days.

I know this has become a true addiction because I lie to my husband about it. He knows what I’ve been watching, but he has no idea how much. My husband is aware and tolerant of my other addictions; I can be honest with him about anything. Except this. I hide the screen of my device from him. I hasten to pretend to be doing something else when I hear him approach.

Shame, of course, is an integral part of addiction.

I knew what I was doing when I started this kick. I am about to embark upon another addiction, I said to myself, as I followed a whim and went to search for “squeeze blackheads.” Don’t do this.

The thing about developing a new addiction at the age of 53 is you know before you start that you will have to quit. You know this new thing isn’t worth it, you won’t even fully enjoy it, because you’ll be too aware that quitting is going to be a bitch.

Yet I persist. This new addiction is so strong, it prevents me from indulging in my other addictions. I sit enraptured by my device, unwilling to spare my attention from the screen long enough to light the joint in my hand. Is this progress?

I tell myself it’s okay to keep watching videos because I’m writing about them. I’m doing research, I think dreamily. I’m researching. Occasionally, I scrawl something in my notebook, e.g., “Western notions of self-care.”

Oh yeah, I think. This baby is writing itself.

I tell myself, I’ll just watch so many videos that I get sick of them, and then I’ll be done forever. This idea comes from the same crocodile brain that came up with, The best way to quit smoking weed is to immediately smoke all the weed so we run out of it and therefore can’t smoke any; let’s start quitting right away.

I’m starting to see that this only ends one of two ways: I quit immediately, or I do this for the rest of my life.

In the context of my relationship with pornography:[3]

I was never a big consumer of visual porn. I saw too much of it as a child. Later in life, I had a relationship with a man who struggled with a debilitating porn addiction. He would promise to call me after work, then he’d spend the entire night jerking off instead.

I understand him far more deeply now than I ever did in the four years we were together.

I object to labeling all pleasurable vicarious experience as “porn”—travel porn, real estate porn, etc. But I do understand where the porn comparison comes from. It’s not sexual gratification these things provide, but it’s a kissing cousin.

I don’t get sexually aroused by blackhead videos, but I am aroused nonetheless. My body responds. An involuntary groan or shudder, a spasm in my leg. The same kind of automatic nerve responses that happen when people watch ASMR videos,[4] which are meant to trigger a happy tingling feeling in the viewer. ASMR is supposed to be stimulating but soothing; these videos, I think, are meant to be revolting but cathartic.

The intimacy, the focus on bodily fluids, the repetitive nature of the action—all of these I recognize from porn. The explosion of goop mimics orgasm, or excretion, or both. When a technician’s tweezers get hold of a dense plug of detritus, and they pull it out by its unwilling ankles, the skin around it tenses and the ensuing pop is palpable. There is a thrilling emptiness and vulnerability to the exposed pore.

Extraction is the opposite of penetration. It’s withdrawal, with all the physical and psychological catharsis that withdrawal can bring. Watching a tweezer mechanically pull shard after shard of waxy crud out of aggravated pores, leaving them gaping—in my head, I call it “the unfuckening.”

My hunger for these videos feels dirty, as does the avidity of my attention. I’m like a cat with a laser pointer, indefatigable. And the specificity of my desires: I either want to see methodical extractions of comedone clusters from elderly skin, or very thorough plucking of the pores, especially on the sides and underside of the nostrils, because that’s where the vicarious feeling is most powerful.

In this way, I remind myself of another guy I knew who could only get off to images of women with high heels stuck in their asses.

I notice that I am getting acclimated to the videos on my playlist. Their effect is wearing off, but my desire to consume them only increases. Will I need to seek out ever more explicit/extreme blackhead content?

[Nota bene: The shaft of the nose, often the focus of these videos, looks a lot like a penis when the skin is stretched in certain directions. The skin of the nostrils can be mistaken for testicular skin.]

In an intersectional context[5]:

I’m not eager to gloat about all the ways in which I am afforded systemic support, but please know that I’m aware of my privileges, and I actively seek to expand those same privileges to less privileged people, when I’m not busy staring at a screen until my eyeballs turn into spirals in their sockets.

Most people in the world do not have the leisure to indulge themselves in hours of gape-jawed stupor, much less to do it so frequently that it becomes a debilitating habit. And to gape at the bodies and the labor of people in economically depressed countries, while I sit amongst all the comforts I’m provided at the cost of theirs, is particularly abhorrent. I know that my attention—my “views,” my “likes,” my “engagement”—they all fund the perpetuation of these inequalities. The impact is most severe for vulnerable and marginalized populations. The tread of my environmental footprint is legible on their backs.

These videos are fundamentally exploitative in nature, and I should continue to feel terrible about myself for watching them.

In a Freudian context:

My mother was adopted as a newborn baby by older, unfit parents who showed her little physical affection. Thus her own tolerance for physical closeness was limited, and she was not equipped to meet the needs of her infant daughter any better than her mother had met hers.

Most of my mother’s physical contact with me during my childhood consisted of side-hugs and playing with my hair. When I hit puberty and developed blackheads, she became keenly interested in my face. “Sit on the edge of the bed,” she commanded, training the gooseneck lamp on me, then leaned forward, her thumbnails aimed for my nose.

Rarely were the sight and smell of my mother so close. Rarely were we so intimate. Rarely was I her focus. These sessions bonded me to my mother, made me imprint on her. Naturally, the process of blackhead extraction bears an outsized emotional heft, and an addictive appeal for me.[6]

In the context of a mid-life/end-of-world crisis:

I remain ambivalent about quitting blackhead videos. In my early, greedy days of discovering them, they produced in me an instant low-grade euphoria that I recognized from practices like meditation and psilocybin use, but without the effort or the dehydration headache.

That euphoria-lite state isn’t easy to induce by other means. I’ve long since burned out on social media; there’s no frisson left there. Video games make me dizzy. Alcohol makes me fall asleep. And, after nigh forty years, smoking weed is partly about pleasure, but it’s also about maintenance. I smoke to keep myself from going through withdrawal.

How rare is simple bliss after the age of fifty? How many thrills do you get, really?[7] I’m happily married; there are no new love affairs in my future unless there’s a tragedy first. I can’t even binge eat anymore without the taste of regret.

Surely, I’m not going to deny myself this dumb, tiny piece of pleasure, this harmless dalliance. Doesn’t everyone with a smartphone kill hours on it daily? Don’t people stream entire seasons of series in one day? I don’t have any dependents, I’m fulfilling my professional responsibilities, I’m not letting anything slip. I’m allowed this. It’s normal and acceptable.

And how is this new habit worse than the years of TV that numbed me from ages 3-15, at which age I fortuitously discovered drugs? It’s not. I sat there, age eight, on the floor of the living room, staring at the screen with little black x’s over my eyes, practicing for a day when we’d need to look away in order to survive.

That day is here. We are unequipped to see as much as we must see. The human brain was not built to deal with this much information at the same time. It’s a 24/7, 360 degree, four-dimensional onslaught on our nervous systems. If you asked 100 people whether they’d like to spend a few years in a pleasant coma during these Endiest of Times, I know I wouldn’t be the only one to answer, Oh, thank God, what took you so long?

Will my blackhead habit temporarily prevent me from thinking about the glee some humans take in torturing and killing others, or about mass animal die-offs, or about the horrors of factory farming? Will it help me ignore the torture of being powerless to protect the ecosphere, and prevent the death of everything I love?

Then why would I give that up.

As an aficionado:

Give me a strawberry nose, speckled with possibility, its pores bursting to excess!

Whiteheads, all in rows, waiting to be plucked and yanked, each pustule yielding unique treasure that—like a cloud, or an inkblot—can be fancied into anything: a grain of wild rice, a friendly ghost, an ochre-headed snake. A cluster of blackheads erupts into a time-lapsed forest of mushrooms; oodles of eggy noodles come spooling from a pinched spout. A yellow snowman, a ruffled bunny, an unshelled snail. A used pipe cleaner. Dirty tears.

And the emptied pores! The holes, the gaps, the breaches, the apertures—so rosy! So vivid! Not tapered, these face-craters, but round all the way down, like a well. How deep the epidermis is, how much volume it can contain! The camera lingers on the collected effluent, piled on the back of one glove. The sheer mass inspires awe.

And the artistry of the esthetician! The precision with which they manipulate the miniscule tip of the tweezer to trap the tiniest keratin plug! The hypnotizing rhythm of their ministrations! Like watchmakers, gemologists, or carvers of netsuke, they are masters of the exquisitely small.

The breathlessness of the tricky extraction is intoxicating. The stubborn deposit behind the ear that must be wriggled and teased for ten minutes before it yields its crumbly umber filling; the baklava of detritus being coaxed from a quarter-sized cone on a cheek—I sit forward on my seat, urging the effort on.

These videos never fail me. I know that, when I get into bed with my phone, and I put my glasses on the night table, the picture will soften, the exhilaration will turn to exhaustion, and the hallowed soporific effect will kick in.

Fun fact! Did you know that clusters of comedones will sometimes form warrens, connected under the upper layers of the epidermis, like the tunnels dug by naked mole rats? But instead of naked mole rats, these warrens are full of oxidized pus to be extruded with the aid of a needle or tweezers!

In a neuroscientific context:

Recently, there’s been some study of the phenomenon of “gross out” videos, a genre that includes blackhead extractions and all its repulsive relatives: ear wax excavation, cyst draining, the debridement of toenail infections, etc.[8] The researchers wanted to know: Why is it that some people enjoy feeling mildly disgusted under controlled circumstances, and some don’t?

In 2021, a neuroscientist gave brain MRIs to an 80-person test group while they watched blackhead extraction videos. They saw that the part of the brain that predicts outcomes was active in people who liked the videos, and less active in people who didn’t.[9]

So if you like the feeling of knowing what will happen next—i.e., if you are on the freakier side of controlling, like I am—you are more likely to enjoy these videos. Science!

Other researchers cite things like morbid curiosity, the thrill of transgression, a deliberate pushing of one’s own boundaries, and a desire for sensation even if it’s negative,[10] but none of those resonates with me.

The real issue, as we all know, is dopamine, the feel-good chemical your brain releases when you’ve accomplished something. The release of dopamine is rewarding; then it disappears and you’re desperate for more.

A significant portion of the world’s population is addicted to the artificial production of dopamine, unable to function without the comfort of a screen. We are the shambling undead, our backs hunched, our skulls drooping, our higher faculties atrophied from disuse. Fortunately, I decided long ago that my strategy in a zombie outbreak was to get chomped ASAP. So, yeah. I’m ready.

In an astrological context:

Yes, I am a Virgo.

In an anti-consumerist context:

The making and distribution of blackhead extraction videos is a capitalist venture, intended only to maximize profits for the video producers. Yet those producers remain bafflingly unanimous in ignoring feedback from their viewers.

Every video produced by the top spas has a comments section full of viewers demanding the same things.

• The esthetician should not leave any of the effluent on the client’s face.
• The esthetician should be scrupulous about leaving every pore empty.
• The esthetician should not overuse the needle or the scalpel and should avoid drawing blood.
• The esthetician should work methodically, completing every extraction in one area before moving to the next; there should be no “skipping around.”
• The commenters universally demand longer videos and steadier camerawork. They employ ALL CAPS, angry/tearful emojis, and artilleries of exclamation marks as they moan about how callously ignored they are.

Which they are! It’s kind of delightful. Nobody answers the comments. Nobody gives a fuck. The esthetician forces a dab of curdled cottage cheese out of a blackhead and just leaves it on the forehead while she skips over to the ear. She tweezes little keratin icicles from a nose and lays them next to the emptied pores. Every few minutes or so, she desultorily brushes or dabs the debris away. Then she goes back to creating more.

So why don’t the producers make what the viewers want? And why don’t the pirates and the re-packagers just make better footage, rather than resorting to absurd measures to steal footage from others? Whyever it may be so, I choose to see it as an act of blatant, straight-faced audience trolling, and it significantly adds to my enjoyment.

In a sociological context:

As noted above, blackhead extraction fans are bossy, demanding, and desirous of control. And that’s not all we have in common. A deeper read of the comments under these videos shows that, no matter where in the world the commenter may be, they likely fall into one or more of six archetypes.

These archetypes, as illustrated by real comments copied verbatim from YouTube, are as follows.[12]

1. The scolds

Are these commenters would-be estheticians? Competing salon owners? Whoever they may be, they’re convinced of their superior skin-care abilities and aggressive in sharing their opinions.

• “This would have been okay if she hadn’t kept piling them up and wiping them all over. What a MESS.”
• “This face deserved someone that would ACTUALLY PUSH EVERYTHING OUT instead of acting like they are when we ALL KNOW YOU ARENT!”

2. The defenders

For every scold, there is an equal and opposite lunatic who is just as vehement about blackheads and the people who squeeze them.

• “Wonderful job! Not sure who appointed some of these people as supervisor or judge but I happen to think your work is right on.”
• “And you are…the World Wide Dermatology Police, or just one of many watching skin care salons go about their daily profession and business in Vietnam? Complainers can give it a rest. Geez.”

3. The unsatisfied customer

These aggrieved viewers have had an unfulfilling experience, not because of the content, but because of perceived flaws in the video or channel itself.

• “The recent videos are over magnified, the cover images are ugly and not accurate, and the titles are misleading. Please correct these faults if you can.”
• “This needs to be an hour long AT LEAST.”
• “We have been begging for new content and they don’t listen to us. Nobody even reads these comments.”

4. The superfan

These commenters are effusive in their love for specific videos, channels, spas, estheticians, and/or clients.[13]

• “The BEST pops & squeezes I have ever seen in my entire life! There is nothing else out there compares to it! This is a master piece, superb! Incredibly perfect in every way! I love this clip. Truly spectacular!! My favorite clip of all time!”
• “My thanks to all involved in making this brilliant video and I sincerely hope for the client’s skin to heal thoroughly.”
• “IMO, Thuy’s skill rests with her eyes. She sees what’s below the skin and clearly identifies what’s living and lurking below the skin. That’s her particular talent – – X-ray vision.”

5. The poet

This is my category—like myself, these people are looking to rhapsodize about blackheads with others who appreciate them.[14]

• “Rosy clean pores feeling the cool air for the first time – free from the choking plugs. Deep joy.”[15]
• “I can’t even begin to describe the sheer Joy I felt when she zoomed on his skin for the first time. It’s like the clouds moved away and the sun shown down onto a beautiful Valley of blackheads!”
• “Can’t believe you can just pull em out like carrots!”

6. The anti-piracy police

As named.

• “This video was stolen from An Spa. You can see he mirrored the footage so the “AN” is showing backward on the glove.”
• “STOLEN FROM LOAN NGUYEN”

In the context of my love of the absurd:

Speaking of piracy, the piracy of blackhead extraction videos inspires a dada-ist collision of algorithmic necessity and batshit aesthetics that I find enchanting. Two examples:

Foiling anti-piracy precautions

Spas who produce videos use standard logos and watermarks to protect their footage from unauthorized reuse, but those rudimentary protections do not suffice. Original videos often show the esthetician inscribing her name on her glove before beginning the process, so the viewer can see continuity between the real human being and the gloved thumb in the close-up. Sometimes, instead of a written name, there’s a sticker for the spa on the thumb.

Pirates get around this by cropping the videos and adding wide frames to the images, so only the very tip of the finger can be seen. The frame may have a jungle theme, or a Valentine’s Day theme, or kawaii cupcakes that appear to be dancing on an oozing nose, bolstering the anarchic incongruity embraced by the genre. The accompanying music will have no relationship to the frame or the video itself.

The literal lengths pirates go to for views

There’s been an emergence of videos boasting run times of more than an hour—exactly what commenters have clamored for. These long videos are produced by several different rip-off channels, but they’re all alike in that they have gory fake thumbnails and florid titles. Flood sense daily with peaceful grace for good work, reads one title appearing over a reworked image of a face with melting leprotic sores.

But they’re not made to satisfy pushy viewers. They’re made to satisfy the algorithm’s preference for longer videos. So the videos don’t show an hour of blackheads. They show twelve or fifteen minutes of extraction footage, and then they’ll abruptly shift into a random tableau for the next hour.

And when I say random, I mean “a monkey in a diaper playing a triangle.” Or “cartoon avatars speaking Mandarin demonstrating how to assemble a barbeque.” Or “pink paint being poured over a plastic corncob in a frying pan.” I am not in the least kidding. The most normal thing I’ve seen used to pad the length of the videos is footage from first-person shooter games. The least normal thing I’ve seen is everything else.

In the context of the current zeitgeist:

The post-truth world is a maddening place to live. In the past, humans tacitly agreed that we existed in an empirical shared reality, where events in time and space occurred and led to other events. That assumption has now been shredded. Cause and effect have been severed, and the fact that six is always less than seven has become an opinion.

We see the bump under the rug where everything’s been swept. Yet we’re told that the bump isn’t real, or it’s nothing, don’t worry about it. We know there’s rot underneath it; we smell the decomposition. What relief it would bring, to remove it!

The skin is irritated. There’s been a build-up underneath, a festering. Now the volcano is impatient to erupt. We understand how it feels. We want to be the agent of the eruption, not its target. We want to force the truth to the surface.

When will the thumbs of justice squeeze the blackhead of lies? Until that time, there are blackhead extraction videos.

In conclusion:

I started this analysis three weeks ago, because it was the only way I could get myself to stop watching videos, sit down at the laptop, and write. I have proceeded to do so, and this is the conclusion.

I will now reward myself with 90 minutes[16] of blackhead extractions.

FOOTNOTES

[1] And so I have an excuse to keep watching blackhead videos.

[2] The popularity of this genre has inspired the fabrication of fake skin through which to extrude fake pus for more dramatic popping/squeezing results. Telltale signs of fakery include the opening in the skin, which will have a starburst shape, and the consistency of the pus, which will be creamier and more homogenous than the organic, chunky effluent.

[3] I am shocked at the dearth of blackhead porn. I’ve never searched for “(thing) + porn” and found no true results, only some autogenerated ads for porn directories. There’s sneeze porn, shit porn, puke porn, killing-small-animals porn, etc., etc., ad infinitum. But, in a stunning violation of Internet Rule #37, there is no subgenre of zit porn. It’s not a fetish. Nobody’s jerking off in the comments of these videos. This allows me to enjoy them so much more.

[4] ASMR stands for “autonomous sensory meridian response,” defined as “a tingling, tickling, or ‘goosebumps’ sensation in the body triggered by certain audio or visual stimuli.” As with blackhead videos, there is a booming market of ASMR videos produced for people who like to shudder and/or writhe for no reason.

[5] In that it intersects with my self-loathing.

[6] This realization alone justifies the amount of time I’ve invested and invigorates me to continue my analysis.

[7] Don’t come at me with some skydiving/white-water rafting bullshit. Can I do it easily and cheaply from my comfy couch anytime I want, without effort or risk, the way I can watch blackhead videos? You go throw yourself off a plane, or into a rocky waterfall. I will be here curling my toes over the wet cigar being forced through a hellhole on some South Asian dude’s back.

[8] I wonder if the researchers, like me, were like, “I better integrate these videos into my work somehow so I don’t have to stop watching them for hours on end.”

[9] Enjoyment of watching pimple popping videos: An fMRI investigation, Wabnegger et al., Behavioral Brain Research, March 2021

[10] “Why Are So Many People Turning to Extraction Videos During the Pandemic?” Natasha March, Popsugar.co.uk, June 2021

[12] Extremely (sic).

[13] Special shoutout to the disenchanted former superfan: “I used to think you were much more thorough. I used to watch you a lot. You were my very 1st favorite. This is the type of video I really like. I just like it to be thorough.”

[14] Special shoutout to the poet’s colleague, the comedian: “Did you hear about the two pimples that went on a crime spree? They eventually got popped! Lol I made that joke up feel free to use it anyone.”

[15] Rosy clean pores feeling the cool / air for the first time – free from the choking / plugs. Deep joy

[16] Four hours.