YouTube sensation Dr Pimple Popper now has her own TV show
INTERNET sensation Sandra Lee, aka Dr Pimple Popper, has just landed a new TV show dedicated to dermatological dramas. It’s not for the faint-hearted.
ANYONE with a facebook or Instagram account knows there’s a subculture of people out there with a strange fascination for pimple popping.
Call it sickening? Call it gross? The movement of passionate peeps obsessed with pustule-eruptions is large and it’s all because of one woman who they call Dr Pimple Popper.
Dermatologist Dr Sandra Lee is hands-down the internet’s high priestess of pus - and it seemingly started by chance.
“I had been practising [dermatology] for more than a decade when I started getting into Instagram in late 2014,” Lee tells Refinery29.com.
“I noticed hairstylists and makeup artists were uploading 15-second clips and before-and-after transformations of their work, and I thought, dermatology is a really visual field. I wonder if people would be interested in seeing what we do, too.”
So Lee posted a simple blackhead extraction.
Fast forward four years and today’s she’s a full-blown internet phenomenon thanks to online videos suggestively titled, “While you’re popping bottles, we’re popping this”, “I ear ya like a good squeeze” and, ominously, “Just when you think you’ve seen it all”.
You can even watch one of her extractions overlaid with Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls by TLC.
Needless to say, they’re not for the squeamish. And certainly best watched before Deliveroo drops off your Cheese Deluxe stuff crust pizza.
“I think watching popping is similar to seeing a scary movie or riding a roller coaster for some,” says Lee, who has now scored her own TV show, simply titled Dr Pimple Popper, that films her poking, prodding and solving a mixed bag of dermatological dramas, often decked out in a squirt-protective face mask.
“You get a rush of euphoria and excitement.”
If only the medico shared the same adrenaline rush she inspires in her legion of faithful followers.
“I’m not really a popaholic myself — I’m what you’d call a “born-again”, says Lee.
“I actually start to sweat when people send me popping videos of themselves. It makes me so anxious to think that someone is in pain, or that the tools aren’t sterile or they aren’t doing it in a clean, controlled environment.
“It’s different when I do it, because I’m in control; I know everything is clean, I know no one is in pain.”
She might not be, but spare a thought for your viewers!
Dr Pimple Popper airs Monday, July 30 at 8.30pm on Foxtel’s TLC.