Normal Skin

When I was a kid, one of my main imaginative portals to adult womanhood was magazines and I doggedly read as many as I could find. Much as I am devoted to the cause of magazines now and mourn their scarcity, I am not sorry to see the passing of such crass moves as a long article directed at teen girls and young woman, devoted to analyzing what might be wrong with your face, hair, or body, and recommending products that might improve these wrongnesses—on the facing page to an advertisement to just such a product! Such criminal acts of capitalism shaped not just how young girls and women were marketed to—the marketing shaped how we were addressed at all by anyone sharing content with us in most contexts. It continues now, of course, in the form of sponsored influencer content online—you can tell when a "beauty influencer” post is sponsored because the influencer hasn’t just enjoyed the product but solved a problem with it. Lady bodies/faces/hair being so much tightly packaged problem columns to be solved, with lashings of money.

This is not revelatory. Finer feminist minds than I have made the above points much more succinctly many times. But this is all preamble to explain why I was in my MIDFORTIES before I realized i have normal skin. This is huge. I knew it was theoretically possible, normal skin being a type that was always listed in the diagnostic articles, but I never thought it could happen to me.

These diagnostic articles were always about figuring out how best to remedy your flaws from a list of possible flaw archetypes, and one sort of neutral type that would perhaps need minimal remedies—the best swimsuits for your body type, the best glasses for your face shapes, and the best skincare for your complexion type. The skin types were always Dry Skin, which needed moisturizer, Oily Skin, which needed some sort of astringent to remove the excess oil, Combination Skin, which was oily in the dreaded T-zone (forehead, nose, and chin) and dry on the cheeks and good bloody luck with that, and…Normal Skin, which theoretically was well balanced already and didn’t need much of anything (other than cleanser, sunscreen, a light moisturizer, and maybe, in the modern times, a serum—such is the baseline of general wrongness a woman’s face just exists with at all times. If a consumer product was this much in need of repair/maintenance at all times, we would send it back.). Similarly, the columns held out that there was a body type that could maybe wear any swimsuit or a face shape that could wear any pair of glasses, along with skin that use most skincare. The question was if anyone actually HAD that type of face/body/skin, which was doubtful. The articles weren’t about feeling good or comfortable or even about finding what worked well and moving on, just about feeling bad enough to buy a lot of products.

Anyway, it has been fun for me, at this late age, to realize my skin looks nice most days, using almost any skincare products I try—basically unless I am ill or have a rash or something. Did it always? I think perhaps it did, and I was just too benighted by cultural and self-esteem issues to notice. But I also try to give myself a break on that stuff. I still buy plenty of skincare products even though I know it’s just big Maybelline grinding my self-worth into the floor to get me to buy a toner—I still just want the toner. Just like we can’t really change the place and culture we come from, I’m not sure we can do much about the specific desire to keep “improving” how I look even if I objectively know I look just fine. Just like when I see women with a different cultural modesty standard than myself—women who cover their hair or faces or knees in public, or else women who sunbathe topless or are chatty while nude in the pool changing room—they just have something else ingrained in them and it’s all coming from outside ourselves, but it we feel it very deeply and may well be powerless to change it. Every now and then I can see past the veil of cultural messages to realize it doesn’t matter if a stranger at the gym sees me naked and that frizzy hair isn’t moral failing, but most of the time, those things do matter to me. And it just is what is.

But how interesting—normal skin! Little old me—I never would have thought it possible!

Also:

Mark went away for six days for the second time this summer. In previous summers, Mark’s absence coincided with catastrophes like me losing my job, Alice getting extremely ill, and me breaking off the tip of a knife in a popsicle and almost swallowing it. The earlier 2025 trip was catastrophe-free but this time the air-conditioner malfunctioned, leaked in a mysterious way, and destroyed some floor tiles along with maybe itself—we shall see when the plumber arrives tomorrow, along with what it is going to cost. We knew the luck of the Markless to be low, but honestly this is far better than in previous incidents—I will take it, especially now that Mark is back to deal with the plumber.

Also also:

MS (makes sandwich) So, you missed me?
RR: Yeah, sure, I missed you.
MS (flips tomato slice onto the floor) I missed you too. (reaches into cupboard for tomato holder, pulls it out, it has a smear of yellow on it)
RR: Oh, no, sorry, I must have put that away dirty somehow. [both look at Mark’s hands, which have mustard on them] Oh, that was you? You dirtied it as you got it out of the cupboard?
MS: Yes, all me. It’s a new Mark Sampson record.
RR: Uh-huh. There’s a tomato slice on the floor.
MS: I’m getting to that. One thing at a time. Hey, you bought havarti?
RR: Yeah, I was going to have a cheese plate while you were away, but I ran out of time. There were leftovers to eat.
MS: I love havarti.
RR: Really? In 16 years, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you try to buy havarti.
MS [picks up steak knife, tries to stab havarti package]
RR: No! [grabs havarti package] See this label, that says “Open here” which you were trying to stab through? That’s where you open here? You just peel it back with your fingers, no stabbing required.
MS: Genius. [picks up tomato slice from floor]