How Max Homa Overcame a Skin Condition Dating to His Teenage Years

It irritated Max Homa for nearly 20 years.

As a teenager, he would wake up in the morning with a dry, flaky scalp, thinking it was dandruff. As Homa got older, though, redness, blotchiness and scaling skin began to appear on his face, too, creeping into his beard. And it didn’t just make him self-conscious about his appearance—it was painful, sometimes to the extent that he could barely move his face.

Multiple creams. Different shampoos. The six-time PGA Tour champion tested every remedy he could think of. Some worked temporarily, but nothing sustained.

“I tried everything under the sun,” Homa told Sports Illustrated, “from just like a general, over-the-counter type thing, pretty much everything except talking to a dermatologist.”

So, about a year ago, Homa’s wife nudged him to get it checked out.

Finally, a diagnosis came: seborrheic dermatitis (known as seb derm).

“If you’ve got a problem, go try to find a solution, and maybe use an expert, not your own self or Google on everything,” Homa says. “I had no idea what [seborrheic dermatitis] was until this.”

Well, what exactly is it?

The condition is a chronic inflammatory disease caused by the immune system being overactive in the skin. That’s what sparks the disease’s manifestation, but it also generates skin barrier dysfunction. That means the skin cells aren’t working properly, leading to some of seborrheic dermatitis’s downstream effects, such as flakes and plaques in the scalp, face, chest and upper back. It impacts roughly 10 million people in the U.S. and disproportionately in men.

There are mental ramifications, too.

“I play golf in front of a bunch of people,” the 35-year-old Californian says. “I do interviews with people. I have a lot of like corporate outings and I would get flare-ups and every morning was like this stressful kind of time of like, ‘O.K., what's it look like today?’”

“[I] played [the WM Phoenix Open in February]. There’s like 200,000 people there. The last thing I’d want is like a big red blotch next to my nose.”

Homa was a top 5 player in the world rankings three years ago. Now, he’s No. 150. He doesn’t believe his seborrheic dermatitis ever negatively affected him in a tournament, considering he’s been dealing with it since age 14. Subconsciously, though, it didn’t necessarily help him, either.

“I don’t wanna sit here and lie and say, ‘Oh man, I had these awful rounds because my face, I knew what my face looked like,’” Homa said. “I’m sure I played well, having bad mornings or whatever, but just in general, it’s just like a constant thought every day of like, ‘What was [my face] gonna look like or what it’s gonna feel like?’ So I can’t imagine that’s a good thing.”

So how did his seborrheic dermatitis improve?

Homa began using Arcutis’s Zoryve topical foam, a once-daily, steroid-free, leave-in prescription treatment for seb derm.

“I mean, I put it on like once in the morning,” Homa says. “I haven’t really thought about [my seborrheic dermatitis] much since like the third or fourth day I used it. For me, fortunately, it worked fairly quickly.”

Because of the foam’s success, Homa has partnered with Arcutis for their “Free to Be Me” campaign.

For years, that would have been a surprise. Homa kept his condition a secret, dreading the day he would tell the world about it. Now, however, he wants to make a difference in the lives of people who can relate to what he’s endured.

“I used to get so much peace and joy when I heard other people say, ‘Oh man, I got dandruff or whatever.’ So I was like, ‘Oh man, I’m not the only one,’” Homa says. “... I just want to nudge people in the direction of like, ‘Go get some help.’”

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