Charlie Baker, 18, from Lancashire is a social media influencer and TV presenter who is engaged to Oliver, an electrician.
Charlie says;
“I was diagnosed with psoriasis in August last year after I had dermal fillers and my body had a reaction to them which triggered my psoriasis.
When I had the first flare up of psoriasis, which I had never experienced before and didn’t know was psoriasis at the time, I thought initially I had caught chicken pox. The aesthetic nurse who had injected my fillers said she thought it was an allergic reaction to something I had eaten and gave me a food supplement powder to mix with water kind of slather onto my face, which was very strange and didn’t do anything to help my skin, obviously.
However, when not only did the ‘reaction’ on my face not go away but got progressively worse and more painful, I decided to go and get a medical diagnosis about what was happening with my skin. After seeing my doctor, I was transferred to a dermatologist at the Royal Preston Hospital, and it was there that I was diagnosed with psoriasis.
Initially I was prescribed immune suppressants, which did work to a degree but at the cost of my immune system not being able to tackle infections, so I stopped taking them. I was also prescribed steroid creams for a while which did improve my skin, but you can’t use them all the time and I was also so worried about the long-term effects of using steroid creams on my skin at my age as they can cause permanent changes to your skin if used regularly. So, while listening to all the options being offered to me by my dermatologist, I also began my own investigation into psoriasis treatments that were less systematically invasive and more natural as I felt my body wasn’t coping well with the medications I was being prescribed.
Meanwhile my skin was getting worse and worse, it felt like the psoriasis was getting more aggressive. At Christmas it had reached a point where I was almost constantly in pain and my skin felt like it was burning all the time. It really effected my mental health and made me feel incredibly low and lacking in self-confidence.
Having a high social media presence and also being on TV can be a cruel world if you’re not looking your best. I’ve seen lots of comments online about my skin that haven’t been very pleasant. Admittedly my face was completely red and I think I made it worse by trying to cover it with makeup which would then peel off and go flaky because of the dryness. People would stare at my skin in the street, and I had kids laughing at me like. It was a really traumatic time, I felt trapped inside my own skin.
The only upside of the whole experience was that in the middle of it all I met my fiancé Oliver. He was so sympathetic and understanding of what I was going through and immediately saw beyond how awful I looked that I knew almost immediately that he was the real deal.
During my own investigation into something that would help my poor skin I must have tried pretty much everything. Anti - redness creams, ‘psoriasis’ creams, eczema creams and various therapies. I’ve spent so much money trying to find something that helped and I had almost given up hope and was considering if I should re-visit the medical route once more when, thankfully, during my deep-dive research I came across Oregon Skincare products earlier this year.
By this time the psoriasis had spread to my scalp and was itching and flaky and felt so uncomfortable it made it hard to sleep. My clothes were constantly covered in flakes and the infuriating itching of teh scalp psoriasis made it hard to concentrate on daily tasks.
I’ve discovered that there’s not much available for scalp psoriasis except these horrible smelly gloopy coal tar treatments, which is how I found Oregon Skincare products initially because they made a shampoo for scalp psoriasis which had loads of very positive reviews and the main thin most people were saying is that apart from working, the shampoo wasn’t smelly or sticky. The Oregon Anti-Plaque Shampoo gave me almost instant relief the first few times I used it, and as promised it didn’t smell and was really easy to apply. The shampoo had the active ingredient in it to treat the psoriasis and while it’s really effective it can leave your hair quite dry, but they also made a special conditioner to use afterwards which left my hair and scalp really soft.
I used the hair care products and the Oregon Maintenance Cream and Intensive Serum daily and within a few hair washes I saw drastic improvements in my scalp and within about a week my skin began to also improve, with the plaques softening and starting to go a paler pink colour rather than furiously red with a silvery dry crust. Both my skin and scalp felt much less painful and itchy within less than two weeks.
Oliver has never actually seen me with clear skin since we met so obviously, he has noticed a massive difference in not only my skin, but also my mental wellbeing. He has been there every night for weeks applying the Oregon cream to all the affected patches, so he sees every improvement more accurately than even I do.
What have I learned from all this? Well, I now know an awful lot about psoriasis and that a far more people suffer from it than is generally realised, two people in every 100 have the condition. I also know it’s a chronic skin condition that I’ll always suffer from now on. There is no ‘cure’.
I would also advise anyone thinking about getting dermal fillers to research very carefully what type of filler you are opting for and also do a patch test on a small area of skin first to check that you don’t have any kind of reaction to it. I had perfectly clear skin before I had fillers and I would never have suspected that they might cause a reaction and trigger an underlying skin condition like psoriasis.
I have also learned that there’s no psoriasis cure as such. No single treatment works for everyone with psoriasis and I've come to understand that the medical options are not the only options that are effective. I would recommend that anyone with symptoms like mine immediately seeks a professional diagnosis and always explore all the options offered, but also do your own research and make sure you choose a treatment programme (which can involve more than one option) that you feel comfortable with.
Above all stay optimistic that there are psoriasis treatments out there that can really help you manage psoriasis and keep it at a level where it doesn’t have to ruin your life. Also, always try to understand that most people’s cruelness about psoriasis is based on a lack of knowledge about it and people who really care about you will always see past your skin.”
