Skin experiment with jojoba oil

I have been experimenting with using jojoba oil on my right cheek for the past weeks. I can't handle topicals normally, but since it's cold and winter now, I can see and feel how dry my skin has gotten. Dryness stirs up redness for many, so I wanted to see if applying jojoba oil, diluted with water on wet skin, would make a difference in terms of skin smoothness and mostly redness and burning. 

Twenty something days further and that cheek looks more smooth now actually, and at times I also think less red, less dry for sure but I also 'feel' it more; more like a constant presence feeling, more tight, more 'present' perhaps. The non treated cheeks burns when it's flushed but when it's not flushed I don't really notice my skin. If that makes sense.. So, still a bit conflicting stuff. I won't use the oil all over my face, just one part of my face until I get more clarity of what it is exactly doing for my rosacea. Some more p&p's from it for sure but only a couple, I can handle that. So I am treating my right cheek with jojoba oil, which will appear in the left in the photographs here. I am making these weird cut offs of my face because I noticed some websites for rosacea using my blog photo's without asking about it first and I don't seem to be able to send them a message about it, they all come back for some reason. I know that once you put these things out on the world wide web, they are a bit out of your control and possession, but at least with these cut up pictures I don't feel as recognizable.. Anyway. Oh and something else I have been doing is using my UVB narrowband lamp again, to naturally crank up vitamin D. I feel it might be helping my rosacea slightly (see for more on that and on the lamp this post about vitamin D and rosacea). See updates below.

My skin before the jojoba experiment, 
taken on good days/moments and less 
good ones (October)

My skin at the start of the jojoba 

experiment, taken on good days/

moments and less good ones 

(December)

My skin a few days into the jojoba 
experiment (December). First pictures 
of my left cheek are untreated, next 
pictures of my right cheek is after 
applying jojoba oil on the right

                                    

Untreated left, treated right 

My skin later into the jojoba oil 
experiment (December). My left cheek 
wasn't treated with jojoba oil, the right was

 Don't see much difference but my right 
cheek burned a lot more..

    

My right cheek which was treated with 

jojoba oil felt more painful, it burned more.
But I think the right (treated) 

cheek looks more smooth in terms of 

skin texture perhaps..

Update February 9th, 2015

Mail from rosacea friend: "Got on your blog and saw your jojoba oil experiment. Questions: what made you choose this oil? Also, as we know oils feed seb derm do you Think seb derm is spreading????? You do not Mention any concern for it. Do you treat seb derm Every day with k cream? I'm very confused right now about the dryness on my Cheeks that has appeared suddenly seems like. Is It common for rosacea skin to be dry, peeling skin on Top or is it all seb derm? I know it's in My eyebrows and upper lip. That's all I can confirm. The rest? My skin has become super sensitized. It's A cycle I can't seem to break. I washed for the first Time with manuka honey ( in many months) and gently Gently rubbed in my skin for 5 minutes. It felt like My skin was coming off. It simply sloughed off-- the Upper layer. I know honey is great exfoliator. Would this Be just dry, old skin from rosacea? My seb derm does not really itch. Has no bumps.

Hi, sorry for the late reply. I've had a bad week with a lot of facial burning and redness, its very cold here with very strong gale winds and I feel too restless to stay indoor all day so am wrapped up like an Eskimo most afternoons braving that nasty weather.. not good for not moisturized skin.. Yess. good one.. I didn't really update on the jojoba trial, I need to.. I felt after a while that the cheek I put jojoba oil on just got more red overall.. Also had p&p outbreaks. It took a good week or more, maybe two, before I saw that pattern because initially that cheeks seemed calmer and less red. But at some point it got pretty obvious that the one I didn't put anything on was calmer and had better skin structure too. Very sad about that as I still want to find a moisturizer which doesn't make me burn, more red, flushed or broken out and all of the above actually. That being said, the jojoba oil didn't make my cheek burn. That was a major thing in itself. And looking back at the pictures now here, I think that treated cheek actually looked pretty good and smooth for a good while. I stopped documenting it when it got more red and had more p&p's as I went into this lazy demoralized mood, but I will have to try the jojoba again I think and give it another go, I intend to do that at a warmer period of the year, when my skin is just a bit less red and angry and upset as now in winter. I chose jojoba oil because it is more like a wax, less of an oily sticky oil, and because it is supposedly most related to actual skin sebum. So most natural and least likely to give a reaction. Also my derm suggested it. I didn't use the jojoba oil on the T-zone areas once I had seb derm flaring again. I have a special made ketoconazole cream from the pharmacist for that. So the jojoba oil might actually worsen seb derm, that makes good sense as seb derm mites feed off sebum. And oils. But I used it only on my cheeks, and my seb derm stays located in the creases around mouth, nose and forehead and chin for me. Now that it is so cold and winter I have the seb derm flaring again and am using ketoconazole cream every day yes, morning and evening. It is made in a neutral wax like substance called cetomacrogol and the pharmacist left the preservative out of it, so it only has an expiry date of a month. Yes rosacea can make your skin very dry and coarse looking and rough structured... If you have that on your cheeks, and not close to the T-zone, I doubt it is seb derm.. Although it could! If you scrape your skin a bit and yellowy flaky grease like skin flaks come off, i think that increases the chance of it being seb derm, but even then, that could also just be rosacea sklin. It's a nightmare to keep the two apart, but when you have both, I think you generally can see where one ends and the other starts. Like; rosacea can flare for me but also calm down again within a few hours, whereas seb derm doesn't and has a more marked outline. So sorry that your skin got so sensitive.. i hate it too, it's like I need to protect MY skin all day instead of it protecting me. Very tiring. I have the dry old skin build up too and after a while it just won't come off unless I scrub it and it looks awful and makes my skin look and feel stripped with some acid. So so sensitive. I'm seeing dr Chu this Thursday and will ask him about it, see what he says as my skin epidermis seems totally diseases and crazy. "