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Those Tiny Yellowish Bumps on Your Lip: What Fordyce Spots Are (and How We Treat Them)
If you’ve noticed small, painless, yellowish-white bumps along the edge of your lips and wondered what they are, you’re not alone — and you’re almost certainly looking at Fordyce spots. They’re extremely common, completely harmless, and yet they cause a surprising amount of self-consciousness. At Shivani Skin Care & Cosmetic Clinic, we treat Fordyce spots regularly using a precise, low-downtime CO₂ laser technique, and we recently published our results in the Journal of Cutaneous and Aesthetic Surgery.
What Exactly Are Fordyce Spots?
Fordyce spots are simply oil (sebaceous) glands that sit a little closer to the surface of the skin than usual, most often along the border of the lips or inside the mouth. They were first described all the way back in 1896, and while they can appear at any age, they tend to become noticeable after puberty, when hormonal changes cause them to enlarge. They’re quite common in adults — occurring in roughly 70–80% of the population — and tend to be somewhat more common in men.
Medically speaking, they’re considered a completely normal variation, not a disease. But “normal” doesn’t always mean patients are comfortable with how they look, and it’s fair for cosmetic concerns to be taken seriously, even for a condition doctors consider benign.
Why Treatment Hasn’t Always Been Straightforward
Because Fordyce spots aren’t a medical problem, they’ve historically gotten very little attention in dermatology literature — most textbooks mention them only in passing. Various treatments have been tried over the years, including micro-punch surgery, electrodesiccation, cryotherapy, topical medications, oral isotretinoin, and laser ablation, but none of these has been the clear gold standard, and results have been inconsistent.
Traditional deep laser ablation, in particular, comes with a trade-off: it removes the spots effectively but at the cost of more thermal injury to surrounding skin, which raises the risk of side effects — especially in patients with deeper skin tones.
Our Approach: The Pinhole CO₂ Laser Technique
Rather than ablating the entire lesion, we use what’s called a pinhole technique: instead of a broad sweep of laser energy across the affected skin, a fine CO₂ laser beam is directed straight down into the center of each individual spot for just a couple of seconds. This creates a narrow column of controlled injury that shrinks the gland from within, while the surrounding, uninvolved tissue is left largely untouched.
What the procedure looks like
- Numbing — a topical anesthetic cream is applied to the lip for about 45 minutes before treatment.
- Targeted ablation — using a CO₂ laser, a single pass is made into each individual spot (or, for larger plaque-like clusters, multiple closely spaced points), precisely targeting the sebaceous tissue.
- Aftercare — a simple antibiotic ointment is applied twice daily for about two weeks while the treated area re-epithelializes.
- Healing — mild crusting is expected for the first couple of weeks, which resolves as the skin heals underneath.
Because only the affected tissue is targeted, healing tends to be faster and more comfortable than with older, broader ablation techniques.
What Kind of Results Can You Expect?
In the cases we’ve treated with this technique, patients saw excellent re-epithelialization within about two weeks, and complete resolution of their spots within 6 to 16 weeks, without any recurrence during follow-up. Importantly, the pinhole approach conserves the healthy skin around each spot, which translates into less downtime and a lower chance of textural or pigmentation side effects compared to older, more aggressive ablation methods.
Is Treatment Necessary?
Not at all — Fordyce spots are entirely benign, and no one needs to treat them for health reasons. But if they’re affecting your confidence and you’d like them addressed, a precise, well-planned laser approach can achieve a genuinely clean cosmetic result with minimal downtime.
If you’ve been curious about these little bumps on your lip and want to know whether treatment makes sense for you, we’re happy to take a look and talk through your options.