skin ranting for dollars!

Saturday, feb. 3, 2007   |   4 comments

Once again, my lovely social barometer friend has offered me (and Jill) a generous sum in exchange for blogging forth about something that is already very much in my thoughts. The topic? My sad, sad aging skin. More specifically, my sad, sad aging skin and the many things I now do — as someone in the clutches of this sagging demographic of 35-45 — to try and save it.

So, okay. I actually didn’t become truly conscious of my wrinkles until maybe a year ago. I’m sure that they’ve been there for much longer than that, but thanks to the awesome adult acne that has plagued me since my twenties, I’ve long ago fallen into the habit of taking off my glasses whenever I find myself within the vicinity of a mirror. The one great side effect of terrible vision is that it acts like a built-in Photoshop filter, blurring and smoothing out the blotches and bumps. I’ll even put makeup on in that semi-blind state, only putting on my glasses at the last possible second to make sure I haven’t colored too far outside the lines. But then one day, while struggling to get my insane hair to stay down, I spotted a sprongy grey hair, levitating there above my head. Then I leaned in for a closer look and discovered that there were plenty more where that came from. And OH! Something about that clichéd, thirty-something hunt for grey hairs shattered the fragile denial that my poor vision and I had built, and I just went for it. I leaned right in and took a close look at my face. And there were the wrinkles: the crow’s feet, the depressing crime-dog crease down the sides of my nose, the furrowed quote between my eyes, all of it. But worse, much much worse: the crazy age spots all over my cheeks and forehead. And don’t forget the acne!

The depressing state of my sad skin, by Evany Thomas.

Oh and chest acne, too.

Known as “melasma,” this sprinkling of ugly weird brown spots is apparently the bi-product of years of Pill living combined with not nearly enough sunblock. That, or bad genes. Or being old. Or swearing? Maybe my foul mouth is to blame? It isn’t really clear what causes it. Also totally unclear is how to fix it.

I went to the dermatologist (the one who helped me with my terrible rash), and he prescribed hydroquinone, which is supposed to bleach the spots away. I used that for a few months, but it didn’t seem to do anything. Plus the cream was brown and gross, and you were supposed to apply it twice a day, which meant I had to put it on in the morning and then head out into public, looking like a giant self-tanning mistake, wearing a crazy, huge hat (because that’s the other thing, hydroquinone causes a terrible sun sensitivity).

So I gave up the hydroquinone and bought some MaMa Lotion ($44.50 for 1.6 ounces at Skincare RX), which is this burning, acidic “gel-lotion” that is supposed to take care of melasma and wrinkles and acne — my personal trifecta! The problem is, its active ingredient is mandelic acid, which comes from almonds, which cause Marco’s mouth and throat to swell up. And after about a month, I got tired of coming to bed and saying, “Don’t kiss me, I have almond face!” I also got tired of the sizzling, itching pain of the acid burning my face off each and every night. The endless peeling, flaking skin was also a bummer — there’s really no way to cover that up. It did make my skin feel a little smoother, but the melasma and acne were still all systems go.

In a fit of melasma miasma, I did a search for “melasma” online and found this insane discussion group, and discovered — after hours and hours of reading painful stories from people who have spent thousands of dollars on lasers and intensive treatments and endless peels and tinctures, only to have the splotches return within a year — that really there’s no good cure for the problem. My fellow melasma sufferers had tried the MaMa lotion, too, and it didn’t fix anything. The hydroquinone was also an almost universal bust (in fact, many people reported that the hydroquinone made things much, much worse). Really the only thing you can do is try not to allow the condition get any worse, which means wearing tons and tons of sunblock, each and every day. Which is what we should have all been doing all along, anyway. Ah, if only Past Evany knew what Present Evany knows now, she would be slathering on that Sea & Ski around the clock. And not, say, pouring baby oil all over her pale, Nordic skin. Oh, Past Evany, how smart you weren’t.

Freed by the understanding of the fact that I can essentially do nothing about the melasma, I recently embarked on the Cosmetics Restriction Diet, a plan that very much appeals to my intrinsic laziness.

Huh. Even after the Restriction Diet, my medicine cabinet is still pretty packed. Oh, the life of an aging female is such a cluttered, bottled-up place.

So nowadays, I don’t do much more than clean my skin with the a mellow cleanser (I’ve been alternating between Bella Pelle’s Gentle Wash Cleanser and Keihl’s Foaming Non-Detergent Washable Cleanser, depending on where I happen to be standing — one bottle being in the shower, the other above the sink) and lather on a ton of sunblock (my favorite is Neutrogena’s Healthy Defense Daily Moisturizer, which I recently found in a 45). And moisturizer: once or twice a week, basically whenever I remember, I slather on Eucerin Q10 Anti-wrinkle Sensitive Skin Creme (my dermatologist recommended it and it really does leave me feeling dewy and hopeful, especially in the neck region — ever since reading Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck, I’ve become uncomfortably aware of the temporal, treacherous nature of my neck skin, so much so that I really do rue even reading that dumb book). And for the acne, I’ve just started using “Stridex Benzoyl Peroxide Powder Pads,” which I recently learned are the same thing as ProActiv’s spendy Unblemish Treat Acne Medicated Lotion. And the breakouts seem to be easing up! Except my neck. My neck is suddenly awash in sea of hot, red subterranean zit action. How cruel is it that I have wrinkles AND acne? It really is unfair. Wasn’t there supposed to be a free-skate break, a sexual prime time between zitty teenhood and my wrinkled decline, when my skin was actually, finally clear, golden, and glowing? Knowing me, the halcyon fresh-skin era lasted all of four hours, four hours that fell right in the middle of some dark night in 1998, and I slept through the whole thing.

Luckily, there’s always the slightly-out-of-focus bathroom mirror shot to simulate the appearance of clear, youthful skin. (The frisky and gut-forgiving tee from teen-fave Forever 21 helps add to the illusion.)