How to Heal a Breakout Overnight

Picture this—you have a big event tomorrow and everything is all sorted. Your outfit is prepped and ironed, your makeup ready on the vanity and you’re getting ready for some much-needed R&R when you feel it:—a pimple. Discovering a new blemish the night before a big day is a fairly universal tribulation, from high school to adulthood, and if you’ve ever been faced with a volcanic pimple before a special event, you’ve undoubtedly scoured the internet for some unhinged advice for banishing the breakout overnight. So, can you actually heal a breakout overnight? If you’re in a pinch, we tapped dermatologists for their best advice for minimizing breakouts while you snooze.

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Can You Heal a Breakout Overnight?

If you’ve ever dealt with acne on any scale, you likely know the unfortunate answer to this one. All of our experts affirm that, much to our dismay, it’s rather impossible to completely heal a breakout overnight, but why? If they can pop up overnight, why can’t the opposite be true? The short answer: acne doesn’t have one definitive cause. “Acne breakouts are usually due to a combination of inflammation, irritation and infection,” Omaha, NE dermatologist Joel Schlessinger, MD begins. “While it is very simple to relieve the pressure inside the acne ‘bump’ by manually either lancing the area or gently expressing the contents, it is hard to control the direction that you pop a pimple, and while some of it might come out to surface, some of it might also go down deeper.”

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New York dermatologist Marisa Garshick, MD agrees, explaining that “Breakouts may be hard to fix overnight, as there are multiple contributing factors that cannot be addressed immediately,” like oil content, clogged pores, inflammation and bacteria. “In some cases, overnight treatments may help to reduce inflammation or oil, but may not be enough to make the breakout disappear completely,” she says.

What Are the Best Ways to Minimize Blemishes Overnight?

While a totally blemish-free complexion after one night’s sleep can’t be promised, there are expert-approved, skin-safe ways to help minimize inflammation more quickly. “Using a spot treatment containing benzoyl peroxide or salicylic acid may help to reduce the breakout overnight,” Dr. Garshick says, adding, “Pimple patches can also be a great option to improve the appearance of a pimple overnight and prevent any picking or popping.”

Speaking of popping, Drs. Joel and Daniel Schlessinger advise that popping a pimple “almost always ends in disaster.” Instead, Dr. Daniel Schlessinger recommends warm and cold compresses. “I am a fan of applying warm compresses to acne pimples if they are ready to pop or close to popping,” he begins. “In the early stages, cool compresses (frozen peas in a baggie are great) can be helpful, and warm, but not hot tea bags, are excellent for pimples that have popped, but are not yet healed.” If you’re really in a pinch, Dr. Garshick advises popping into your board-certified dermatologist’s office for a steroid injection to reduce inflammation and tackle the blemish from the source.