Field Notes · July 29, 2026 · 8 min · By Yannick Sorensen
Counting your own bumps: a four week protocol that beats the mirror
You cannot tell whether a shaving product is working by looking at your face, because razor bumps come and go on their own and your memory of last month is worthless. The trials that test these products solved this problem decades ago, and their method fits on a phone.
Every product cycle for razor bumps runs the same way. You buy the exfoliating toner, or switch the razor, or start the new post shave routine. Two weeks in you have a good week and decide it is working. Week four is bad and you decide it is not. Week six is fine again and you cannot remember whether you are still using the thing you were testing. Eventually you stop and try something else, and you have learned nothing at all about whether any of it helps.
This is not a discipline failure. It is a measurement failure, and it happens because pseudofolliculitis barbae fluctuates naturally. Lesions rise and resolve over days. A single bad week means nothing on its own, and the human eye plus a four week old memory is not an instrument capable of detecting a thirty percent improvement, which is a perfectly good result.
The original element in this piece is a four week home lesion count protocol, adapted from how clinical trials in this condition actually measure outcomes, reduced to a fixed zone, a fixed light, a fixed day of the week and a number written in a note. The trials are public and their method is well described. Nobody has translated that method into something a person can run on their own face, which is odd, because the translation is straightforward and the result is the only honest way to answer the question you are actually asking.
How the trials measure it. Studies in this condition do not report whether patients felt better. They count. A controlled trial of a benzoyl peroxide and clindamycin gel against vehicle reports papule counts at defined time points. The influential work on shave frequency and regimen variation does the same, and it is worth noting what that study was testing: not a product, but how often you shave and with what routine, which turned out to matter. More recent work comparing chemical peeling with long pulse Nd:YAG laser likewise reports counts before and after.
The structural features these studies share are the useful part. A defined anatomical area, counted the same way every time. Fixed intervals, typically every two to four weeks. Counting done by the same observer under the same conditions. And a defined lesion type, so that papules are counted as papules and post inflammatory dark marks are not mixed in with them.
Every one of those is reproducible at a bathroom sink.
The protocol. Pick your day and your time and do not change them. The best choice is the day of the week you shave, counting immediately before you shave rather than after, because a fresh shave inflames the skin and adds lesions that resolve within two days. Same time of day, because the skin looks different in the evening.
Pick your zone. One zone only, on one side. The right side of the neck below the jawline is usually the best choice, because it is the highest density area in most people and the most reliably affected. Define it by landmarks you can find with your fingers every week: from the angle of the jaw below the ear, down to the top of the collarbone, and forward to the midline of the throat. Write the landmarks down once so you use the same zone in week four that you used in week one.
Set the light. Stand facing a window with daylight coming from the front, overhead bathroom lights off. Then, for a second look, turn so the light comes across the zone from the side, which raises small bumps into relief and shows you the ones you would otherwise miss flat on.
Now count three separate numbers, and keep them separate. Count one, raised bumps, meaning anything you can feel as elevated when you run a fingertip lightly over the zone, whether or not it is red. Count two, inflamed lesions, meaning bumps that are red, tender or have visible pus. Count three, flat dark marks, meaning discolouration with no elevation at all, which are the residue of past lesions rather than active disease.
The reason for three numbers instead of one is that they respond on different schedules. Inflamed lesions respond fastest to a change in routine. Raised bumps follow. Flat dark marks can take many months to fade regardless of what you do about the underlying bumps, and mixing them into a single count is the single most common reason people conclude a working treatment has failed.
Photograph the zone in both lighting conditions after you count, and write the three numbers in a note with the date. Ninety seconds a week.
Reading four weeks of numbers. Change one thing at a time and give it four counts. This is the hardest part of the protocol and the one people ignore. If you switch razor, change your pre shave routine and add an acid in the same week, you will get a number at week four that tells you nothing about which of the three did it.
Compare week one against week four on the same count type. A drop in inflamed lesions with raised bumps roughly unchanged means the intervention is calming inflammation but not preventing hairs from re entering the skin, which is what a topical antimicrobial or anti inflammatory typically does. A drop in raised bumps means something upstream changed, which is what a change in shaving technique or frequency or a change in blade does. Flat marks unchanged at four weeks is expected and is not a failure.
Anything under about a twenty percent change in either direction should be treated as noise at these numbers. Home counting on a small zone is not precise enough to detect small effects, and reading a drop of two lesions as success is how people end up loyal to products that do nothing.
What the studies do not tell you. There is no validated patient self assessment instrument for this condition. The counts in trials are done by trained investigators, often with standardized photography, and inter observer agreement on what counts as a papule is itself a known issue in dermatology trials. So a home count is less reliable than a trial count, and it should not be presented as equivalent.
The severity scales used across published studies also vary, which means the percentage improvements reported in different papers are not directly comparable to each other, let alone to your bathroom numbers. What transfers is not the absolute figure. It is the method: fixed zone, fixed light, fixed schedule, separate counts, one variable at a time.
The takeaway. You will spend money on this either way. Four numbers a week for a month is the difference between knowing which of the things you bought is earning its place in the routine and cycling through products forever on the strength of how last Tuesday went.