The Tretinoin Purge
your skin gets worse before it gets better, and that's literally the point
Grounded in the research on Wikipedia: Tretinoin (retinoic acid); dermatology literature on retinization
what it actually is
Tretinoin is retinoic acid, the prescription-strength vitamin A derivative dermatologists hand out for acne and aging. The 'purge' is the breakout wave a lot of people hit in the first few weeks of using it. Your face looks worse, sometimes way worse, and everyone online tells you to push through. It's not the product failing. It's the product working faster than your skin expected.
the mechanism
Tretinoin speeds up skin-cell turnover hard. Clogs that were already forming deep in your pores get rushed to the surface all at once instead of slowly over weeks. So microcomedones that would've surfaced in a month surface in days — that's the 'purge.' It's pulling existing future-pimples forward in time, not creating new ones. FDA-approved as Retin-A since 1971, so this is real medicine, not a TikTok hack.