Dr. Sandra Lee is a dermatologist in Los Angeles, and she’s also a social media genius. You see, Lee is also known by her YouTube name, “Dr. Pimple Popper,” and she is quite a sensation on the video platform. Her videos are, as suggested by her title, vlogs of minor surgeries that involve plain old pimple popping, blackhead removal, cyst demolition, and plenty of other puss-filled excavations of the human body.
Lee’s YouTube channel has received attention from various media organizations including Refinery29, Racked, Cosmopolitan, and Vice, and for good reason—she has over two million subscribers and many of her videos have received tens of millions of views. Her content is not dissimilar to shows like Botched or Dr. 90210 in that it offers viewers a truly voyeuristic opportunity to witness a stranger’s medical procedures. Lee’s videos, however, are a more evolved and accessible form of this ethically questionable phenomenon. They reject the often-staged drama and anxiety in the operating room or around the office; they make no time for the patient’s personal narrative (sometimes we never see the patient’s face).
These videos are purely portraits of pimples, and they capitalize on the “horrific factor” that renders so many surgery-predicated shows successful: the camera rests, for the duration of a ten or twenty-minute video, on pimples or cysts brimming with fluid, on the brink of bursting. It seems that the variable missing from glitzier surgery shows was, in fact, a sort of “found footage,” low budget, simplistic quality that Lee utilizes. Dr. Pimple Popper identified a gap in the media landscape and filled it.
The vlogs possess an almost comedic aspect in that we hear Dr. Pimple Popper attempting to make small talk with her patients while also softly muttering to herself about the stubbornness of a particular pimple or cyst. Meanwhile, all the viewer sees are Lee’s hands and tools prodding at the pustule in question. Moreover, the names for these individual vlogs are scintillating. From “Blackheads for Dayzzzz” to “Is this Guy Growing Onions on His Back?”, Lee’s hyperbolic titles make it hard to stave away curiosity for the bodily spectacle awaiting.
What is phenomenal about Dr. Pimple Popper’s YouTube presence is that she uses her practice to appeal to some of the basest human tendencies, like our affinity for gore and keen interest in the bodies and traumas of others.
This is why Lee is, for better or worse, a social media genius: she found a legal, cheap way to further promote her already flourishing career. Her videos raise some ethical dilemmas, and it’s important to think about why certain media objects, in an age when anyone can create and share content, are compelling and whether they are enhancing our understanding of the world or simply feeding our insatiable primordial instincts.
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