It will be the Year of Perfect Skin, I told myself. I had arrived at my mid-forties, and the mirror suddenly gave me a face crosshatched with creases. I was Portrait of a Woman Aging. I was a cubist composition, something by Picasso. I was a strange collage of exhaustion. Mouth, eyes, along the Cupid’s bow of my lips—each one was crinkled like a piece of paper that had been balled up and then pressed flat again.Article continues after advertisement
I no longer looked twenty years younger. But, worse, my skin had broken out in a strange midlife puberty. Every morning, another pink spot on my cheek. Every night, another small mark of embarrassment written along my jaw.
To begin the Year of Perfect Skin, I ordered creams and moisturizers, serums that arrived in glass ampules, oils I would measure out by the droplet. I learned to double-cleanse: first a balm that melted like butter, then a soapy liquid to wash all residue away. I ordered little disposable face towels from a company called Clean Skin Club, because immaculate skin was a society I wanted to join. I tapped something called essence into the fat of my cheekbones. My fingertips moved across my face the way they did across the keyboard of my laptop. I wanted glass skin, bouncy skin, skin slickened like the trail a snail leaves behind. Tap. Tap. I am revising myself, I said.
