Twenty Years of Eczema, and How It Ended

For twenty years I had an allergic skin condition — from the age of eleven until I was thirty-one. It’s gone now. This is the whole story: everything I tried, everything that failed, and what finally changed.

Contents

Prologue
The symptoms
Timeline
What I was actually diagnosed with
Everything I tried
How I overcame it
What I think happened
What I can’t prove
What it gave me

1. Prologue

Late August 2025, on the trail up to Garibaldi Lake, about halfway.

It’s high enough there that the temperature had dropped to ten degrees. I was in short sleeves and the air was cool on my arms. I had a rash on my wrist that morning — I’d had it for months — and I remember looking at it and thinking, this is going to settle down.

Not hoping. Thinking.

A day passed, then another, and the flare I’d been carrying all summer went down and stayed down. And somewhere in there a sentence arrived in my head, complete and certain:

I don’t think I’m going to get rashes anymore. I think I’m healed.

I was right. My skin has been clear ever since — through a full summer, the season that had ruined every year of my life until then.

It took twenty years to get to that sentence, and I want to lay out those twenty years properly: what the condition actually was, what I was told, everything I tried, and what I think finally changed. I’ve organized it so you can skip to whichever part is relevant to you. If you’re here because you have something similar, the symptoms and the list of treatments are probably the most useful sections.

I’m not a doctor. Nothing here is medical advice.

2. The symptoms

If you’re trying to work out whether your situation resembles mine, this is the section that matters.

What it looked like. Red patches, raised, sometimes with small bumps. It never looked the same twice — different shape in different places, different pattern depending on the year. Sometimes a clean-edged patch, sometimes a spray of small bumps, sometimes just angry red skin with no shape at all.

The itch. Severe. Not a background irritation — the kind that takes over your attention.

Worse at night, always. I would wake up in the morning with dried blood under my fingernails and no memory of scratching. This was the single most consistent feature across twenty years.

Heat under the skin. When a flare came on, the area got hot. Not warm — hot enough that I could feel it from the inside, like something burning just below the surface. This is why I reached for ice packs rather than creams.

Where it appeared. It started on the inside of my wrist. Over the years: backs of hands, one cheek, and eventually scattered across my body. In 2015 it appeared in the exact shape of where my sandal straps sat — which, I later learned, is a classic contact-dermatitis pattern.

Seasonality — the strongest pattern of all. Hot, humid Korean summers were the worst. When the air turned cool in autumn it eased. By winter I could sometimes forget I had it. Some years it left me completely alone. Some years it was one small patch on one finger. And then summer would come and my whole body would riot.

Spreading with scratching. The very first spot spread because I scratched it, and that held true for twenty years. Scratching didn’t relieve it; it recruited more skin.

The pattern I want to highlight, because it turned out to matter: heat predicted my flares far better than anything else. Not dust, not detergent, not food. Heat, humidity, and sun.

3. Timeline

When	What happened
Summer 2005	Age 11, fifth grade. A small red spot appears on the inside of my wrist after a day at the Han River. It itches, I scratch it, it spreads.
2005	Local dermatology clinic. Molluscum contagiosum identified on the back of my hand — unrelated, as it turned out. Referred to a university hospital.
2005	Skin biopsy at Korea University Hospital. Result: eczema. First prescription works, then stops working.
2005–2015	A decade of living with it. Seasonal cycle. Dermatologist visits only when severe. Steroid creams. Long sleeves every summer.
~2006–2008	Korean medicine clinic known for treating atopic skin. Herbal medicine for months. Dandelion extract. Told my lungs are very weak.
High school	Beijing, with my father and sister. A doctor takes my pulse and says the same thing: your lungs are weak. Roughly a million won of herbal medicine. No effect.
Summer 2015	Taiwan with my sister. Severe flare, worst around my sandal straps.
2015	Hanyang University Hospital. Photographs, blood work, full allergy panel. Allergy levels seven times the normal range, dust mites highest. Diagnosed as mixed — atopic and contact dermatitis.
2015–2016	Medication climbs from two pills to three to four. I stop going.
2016 onward	Self-directed: whole-food diet, over 400,000 won of probiotics, health reading. Skin unchanged.
2024	Move to Vancouver. Partly for the air. The sun here turns out to be brutal, and my skin gets bad again.
Late Aug 2025	Garibaldi Lake hike. The turning point.
16 Sept 2025	I write in my gratitude journal that I’ve overcome it.
Since	Clear. Through a full summer.

4. What I was actually diagnosed with

This section is more important than it looks, and it’s the part I understood least until recently.

For twenty years the phrase I carried was 알레르기성 피부질환 — allergic skin condition.

It sounds like a diagnosis. It isn’t one. It’s a category — an umbrella covering atopic dermatitis, contact dermatitis, hives, drug reactions. It’s what a doctor says when speaking casually to a patient, or when the picture is genuinely mixed and hasn’t been pinned down.

Here’s the complete record of what anyone ever established:

2005, biopsy: eczema.
2015, blood work: allergy levels seven times the normal range, dust mites highest, then dust.
2015, clinical opinion: some atopic dermatitis, probably some contact dermatitis too, layered together.

That’s everything. And it’s less than it sounds like, for three reasons I only understood later.

The IgE number didn’t explain my flares. I lived in the same rooms, slept in the same bedding, and my skin was fine every January and on fire every August. Dust mite sensitization is also extremely common among people with eczema in Korea — closer to a background feature than an explanation. That number told me I was atopic. It didn’t tell me what to avoid.

The contact dermatitis half was never tested. The gold-standard test for allergic contact dermatitis is patch testing — a delayed-reaction test read over 48 to 96 hours. What I had was blood work and prick testing, which measure a completely different, immediate type of reaction. Nobody ever patch tested me. So that half of my diagnosis was a clinical impression, not a finding.

And nothing ever explained the heat. The single most reliable predictor of my flares across twenty years was never investigated at all.

I’m laying this out because it matters for the end of the story. Nobody ever established what was actually causing my skin to do this. Which means my own theory and the official one stand on more equal footing than you might assume.

5. Everything I tried

Grouped by kind rather than by year, so you can find whatever’s relevant to you.

Conventional dermatology

Prescription creams and oral medication (2005–2016, on and off). The first prescription after my biopsy worked. Then it stopped. This became the pattern — each new thing worked for a while and then didn’t.

Topical steroids (years of use). Effective at first. Progressively less so. Eventually I was applying them out of habit and the feeling that I ought to be doing something.

Escalating oral medication (2015–2016). After the Hanyang workup I went back for months, and the dose kept climbing. Two pills, then three, then four. I was twenty-one, and I understood clearly that this was heading toward a larger and larger dose indefinitely rather than toward a cure. That’s when I stopped going.

Verdict: short-term relief, no lasting change. I want to be careful here — I stopped because my treatment was escalating without working. That was my situation and it may not be yours. Don’t read this as a reason to stop yours.

Korean medicine

Herbal medicine at a clinic known for atopic skin (months). Sealed pouches, torn open and drunk daily. This was during the period when childhood atopic dermatitis had become a national conversation in Korea and there was a whole industry ready for worried parents.

Dandelion extract.

Pulse diagnosis. The doctor held my wrist and told me my lungs were very weak, then connected that to my skin. I was a child and he was a doctor and I believed him completely. That single sentence shaped how I thought about my own body for the next fifteen years — I became careful about air quality, where I lived, whether a room felt stale.

Beijing (high school). At a hospital there, a doctor took my pulse, and his face got serious in a way I still remember, and he said the same sentence: your lungs are weak. Fifteen hundred kilometres away, different country, different language. We spent close to a million won on herbal medicine and carried it home in our luggage.

Verdict: no effect on my skin. What stays with me isn’t the medicine — it’s how completely one sentence from someone in a white coat installed itself in a child and stayed for fifteen years.

Diet and supplements

The Bulletproof Diet (2015–2016). Dave Asprey’s book was the first thing that made me change how I ate on purpose rather than by default. I cooked. I ate whole foods. I paid attention.

Kimchi-derived probiotics (over 400,000 won). Gut bacteria were becoming a mainstream topic and the first serious products were arriving in Korea. I was a university student and I remember justifying the purchase to myself carefully.

Verdict: no effect on my skin. But this is where my interest in health actually began, and that interest has given me more than the condition ever took. I count it as the most valuable failure on this list.

Symptom management

Ice packs. For the burning. The most effective thing I ever found, and it treated nothing.

Aloe gel. Cooling, temporary.

Verdict: genuinely useful for getting through a bad night. Nothing more, and I stopped expecting more.

Changing my environment

Moving to Vancouver (2024). Not the only reason I moved — I wanted to study English, and living abroad had been on my list for years — but a real one. I’d been told since I was eleven that my lungs were weak, Seoul’s air quality is genuinely bad, and somewhere in me was an unexamined hope that leaving would ease this.

The humidity is lower here, which helped and which I noticed immediately. But the sun is brutally direct in a way Seoul’s never was. My skin got bad again.

Verdict: the one that hurt most. I had moved across the world partly for this, it hadn’t worked, and I was thirty. That was a low point I didn’t fully admit to at the time.

6. How I overcame it

The day

Late August 2025. A hike to Garibaldi Lake, leaving around six in the morning.

I woke up that day with my period, feeling genuinely terrible — cramping, heavy, the kind of morning where the only reasonable decision is to stay in bed. I thought seriously about canceling. I went anyway.

At the trailhead the cramps were bad enough that I wondered whether I’d make it up. I took two Tylenol and started walking, and I started saying something to myself, out loud and then in my head, over and over:

I’m good. I’m good. I’m good.

I didn’t mean it. It was something to hold onto while my body sorted itself out.

By the halfway point the temperature had dropped to ten degrees. I was in short sleeves and the air was cool on my arms and it felt good — that specific relief of being cool when your skin runs hot all the time. I looked at the rash on my wrist, the one I’d had for months, and thought: this is going to settle down.

Then the Tylenol came on properly and the cramps let go. The walking felt good. My whole condition lifted, rose up out of the morning I’d woken into.

And here’s the part I keep returning to. It didn’t feel like the Tylenol. It felt like it lifted because I had been repeating that sentence to myself.

I know how that sounds. I’m telling you what it felt like.

The days after

So I kept doing it. The next day, and the day after, walking around with I’m good running underneath everything.

The flare I’d been carrying for months went down.

And then the sentence arrived — not a hope, not a wish, but a piece of information arriving whole: I don’t think I’m going to get rashes anymore. I think I’m healed.

The diary entry

I waited about two and a half weeks before writing anything down. I think I was checking whether it would hold.

It held. On the sixteenth of September, 2025, I wrote this in my gratitude journal:

09.16.25 드디어 극복했다. 내 피부가 건강해졌다. 햇빛과 뜨거운 날씨는 내 몸을 치유하는 자연적인 에너지다. 모든건 다 내 마음에 달려있음을.. 이걸 극복하는데 20년이 걸렸네. 이제 내 몸을 더욱 사랑해줘야지.

I finally overcame it. My skin is healthy. Sunlight and hot weather are natural energy that heals my body. Everything really does depend on my mind. It took me 20 years to get over this. Now I’m going to love my body even more.

I want to point out the tense, because I only noticed it much later. I didn’t write I think it’s getting better. I wrote 극복했다 — I overcame it. Past tense. Finished. No hedge anywhere in it.

I had no evidence that would have satisfied anybody. Two and a half weeks of clear skin, after twenty years, in the middle of the season that had ruined every August of my life. I hadn’t been to a doctor. Nothing in my treatment had changed — I wasn’t taking anything, applying anything, or avoiding anything.

I had changed what I expected to happen to me. And I wrote it down as a fact, because by then it had stopped feeling like a hope.

What I do now when a patch appears

Small patches still show up on my fingers occasionally. What changed is what happens next.

I read them as information — ah, I’ve been stressed about something — rather than as the opening move of the next three months. And because I’m certain it isn’t going to spread, it doesn’t. The itching and the spreading and the blood under the fingernails simply don’t follow anymore.

When the heat comes, I tell myself something different from what I told myself for twenty years: sunlight is natural energy that heals me.

It still flares when my daily routine falls apart badly enough. I think that’s the same mechanism, running the other way.

7. What I think happened

For twenty years the sequence was this: the weather turned hot, or the sun got strong, and I would get a feeling that a rash was coming. And then a rash would come.

I always read that as my body knowing something before I did — some early-warning sense, my skin registering the heat before the rash surfaced.

I now think the causation ran the other way. I think the feeling was making the rash.

Not entirely. Not magically. But far more than I suspected across twenty years of assuming the opposite.

Three things support this, for whatever they’re worth:

The original episode fits. Summer 2005, eleven years old, walking home from the Han River. I remember the feeling I had that day, and it wasn’t itchiness. It was 찝찝한 — grimy, unsettled, off. Something not right on my skin and in my head at the same time.

I’m a sensitive person, and it’s physical. New places, heat, dirt, disorder — I feel those in my body, not just in my mood. I think that’s what my symptoms were built out of, from the first spot on my wrist.

It runs in my family, in a different form. My father is extremely sensitive and sleeps badly. He has allergic rhinitis. Watching him over the last few years, I’ve noticed his rhinitis is always worst when we travel — new place, disrupted routine, body on alert.

Why it took ten extra years

Somewhere in the worst of it, I found a personal blog post by a stranger. They’d had acute allergic dermatitis, sudden and severe. They wrote that they’d been carrying something unresolved since childhood, that at some point they forgave the person involved, that their mind became peaceful — and that the dermatitis they’d had for two or three years simply disappeared. They concluded the wound had been the cause.

I read that and came to a conclusion that kept me stuck for a decade:

I don’t have a wound like that. There was no big event. There’s nothing for me to resolve. So there’s no way out for me.

I thought the mechanism required a trauma. I didn’t have one, so I assumed I was disqualified. I was completely wrong.

I was also interested in the law of attraction and in 시크릿, and years ago I read several of Joe Dispenza’s books — the man who walked again after a car accident, through meditation. I remember closing one of them and thinking: right, I could heal my skin through my mind.

I understood it. I was moved by it. I could have explained it to you.

But I didn’t feel it. It stayed an idea I found interesting.

What happened on that mountain wasn’t an idea. It was the first time I felt, in my body, while it was happening, that what I believed was doing something physical to me. That’s the difference between the years I spent knowing this and the time since, which I’ve spent living it.

8. What I can’t prove

I’d rather hand you the objections myself than have you find them.

I moved countries. Vancouver in 2024 — different climate, humidity, allergens, water, food. Any of that could be doing work I’m crediting elsewhere.

Childhood eczema commonly fades in adulthood. It does. I was thirty-one. My timing is not unusual and I’d be foolish to pretend otherwise.

Nobody ever proved the allergy part. My blood work showed I’m atopic. It never showed dust mites were causing my flares, and the contact dermatitis half was never patch tested. Nobody established the cause in twenty years.

I am not telling you to stop your treatment. I stopped mine because it was escalating and not working. That was my situation. It may not be yours.

What I do know is that stress and skin are not separate systems, and that part isn’t mysticism. Cortisol affects the skin barrier. Stress lowers the threshold at which you feel itch. Scratching damages the barrier and makes the itch worse, which makes you scratch more. Whatever happened to me happened somewhere in that loop.

I just think the loop runs deeper than anyone ever told me.

9. What it gave me

Twenty years of this hurt. As a teenage girl it did real damage to how I moved through the world — being asked what’s wrong with your skin, being convinced that every person on the street was looking at me — and I’m not going to pretend it was a gift.

But I want to be honest about the other side of it, because it’s the reason this website exists.

It made me study my own body

Most people in their twenties don’t think about their health. They have no reason to. Their bodies work, so their bodies are furniture — always there, never examined.

Mine didn’t work, and it made itself impossible to ignore. So I started paying attention roughly fifteen years before I otherwise would have.

That attention started as desperation. I read The Bulletproof Diet at twenty-one because I wanted my skin to stop, not because I cared about nutrition. But once you start actually looking at what you eat, and how you sleep, and what the air in your room is doing to you, you can’t easily stop looking. In my late twenties it stopped being desperation and became genuine interest. I studied it. I read properly.

And I developed a habit that I think is the most valuable thing I got out of all of this: I test things on myself, and I give them years rather than weeks.

I’ve used shampoo bars since 2021. I’ve watched my father’s rhinitis across dozens of trips. I tracked my own flares against seasons, temperatures, places, and moods for two decades before I understood what I was looking at. That kind of patience isn’t a virtue — it’s just what you learn when a problem refuses to resolve and you have no choice but to keep observing it.

Where that left me

I’m thirty-two now. My body is in better condition than it was at twenty-five, which is not how this is supposed to go.

I sleep better than I did in my twenties. I pay attention to air quality — a habit I picked up from a Korean medicine doctor telling an eleven-year-old her lungs were weak, which may or may not have been true, and which I’m keeping regardless because it turned out to be good advice by accident. I cook. I notice when my routine starts breaking down, because my skin taught me to notice.

None of that cured me. I want to be very clear about that, because it would be easy and dishonest to imply otherwise.

Managing my health did not fix my skin. It went the other way. Having the condition is why I built the health I have.

That’s the trade. Twenty years of a body that wouldn’t cooperate, in exchange for a decade-and-a-half head start on understanding it.

I’d rather have had both. But I’m genuinely grateful for what I got.

And that’s what this site is

Everything else on supality.com comes out of that head start. What I’ve tried, what worked, what was expensive and useless, what I’ve kept doing for years and why.

I’m not writing as someone who got interested in health and longevity as a hobby. I’m writing as someone who was handed a body that made problems and spent twenty years learning to read it.

That’s the only qualification I have. I think it’s a reasonable one.

Short sleeves

From the time I was eleven until the summer of 2025, I covered my arms. Long sleeves in August. A cardigan when it was thirty degrees. Sitting in cafés in Seoul in the middle of summer, sweating, covered, because being hot was easier than being asked.

Twenty years of that.

Now I wear short sleeves. In public, in the sun, without thinking about it — and then occasionally I do think about it, and it stops me for a second.

That’s the part I still can’t quite get over. Not the healing. The sleeves.

I’m Yoonju. I write about health, longevity, and what I’ve actually tried. Nothing here is medical advice.

Last updated: July 2026. My skin has stayed clear since September 2025. If that ever changes, I’ll say so here — it would be dishonest to leave this page standing if it stopped being true.