Skin is Stupid

And other elderly observations

Lord help us, y’all.

I’m sure you’ve seen all the AI help that goes beyond what we could do in Adobe Photoshop back in the day. I remember laboriously fine tuning every picture, removing the scratches and the zits and adding a little dewy glow to the cheeks.

Now, AI can make you look like a whole other person. When I was younger, I thought all I had to be worried about was wrinkles and yes, I’ve got those, but one of the good things about fat is that it smooths those suckers right now except for the pretty little crow’s feet around the eyes. *bat*bat*bat*

Photography, of course, is all about positioning and any YouTube video can tell you how to take better selfies to look pretty and saucy and all that. I normally throw on some makeup when I’m getting dressed in the morning, whether I am going out or not. I still do, by some outrageous miracle, have a husband and I like to look as nice for him as I can so he doesn’t fall into a big ol’ vat of buyer’s remorse.

No matter what I do, makeup slides off my face like eggs off Teflon. *Zip* and it’s gone. I used to think it was sweating, and sure, that’s probably part of it. Then I thought it was because I used cheap, drugstore makeup until I tried top line makeup when I got older and it did the same thing. My daughter said it was because I didn’t use primer and finishing spray, so I started using primer and finishing spray and nope… still the same. I have makeup on until I walk out of the bathroom and then it’s gone. I might as well apply the makeup to the mirror instead of to my face for all the good it does.

I’m not saying I’m afraid to go out without makeup on because, let’s face it, as quickly as my makeup is gone, I pretty much am going out without it anyway. I do like to have my eyebrows on and they have a bit more staying power. My eyebrows were always sparse and we were married eight years before Eric saw me without my eyebrows on. I have nightmares that I have the big, eternally surprised, drawn-on eyebrows that ladies of a certain age used to have.

I use concealer, primer, good foundation thick enough I should apply it with a spackling tool, finishing powder, and finishing spray. I’ve even done the makeup baking that drag queens do and still, off it goes.

I mentioned that photography is all about positioning and in the photo above, I promise I am not cross-eyed. I was looking across at the phone camera. I should have fixed that eyeball with photoshop, right?

But check out what happens if I turn my head even a quarter turn:

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, folks!!! I have age spots for days. They are on my hands and up my arms and on my cheeks and probably other places I can’t look to see. There are some parts of my body no human has seen since I was released from hysterectomy post-op care in June 2022. God alone knows what’s going on down there.

But wait! There’s more! What happens when you scare yourself to death by looking DOWN into the selfie camera to switch the perspective?

The dreaded gobbler. The extra chin(s). I could feed a family of chipmunks with what I could store in there. Like Weird Al says, “I got more chins than China Town.”

Then there are these things affectionately called “barnicals of aging” that have the tasty medical name of seborrheic keratosis or in most cases, “Seborrheic keratoses,” as in the plural. They are these weird little rough patches that crop up on your skin and the first time you see one or three or ten, you panic because you think it is basal cell carcinoma or something. In truth, you can just scratch them off and go about your business, but they are annoying. I get those on my back and in the bend of my knees. Thankfully, back then I had a health care provider who could help me navigate those terrifying waters.

I always wondered why my first mother-in-law (Helen, after whom I named every chicken I ever owned because they looked at me as if they despised me) bathed in original Jergen’s lotion all the time. She was fifty-eight when, much to her utter horror, I married her son and that’s about the time my skin began to dry up like the sands of the Sahara. I have lotion in every room and a’slatherin’ we shall go.

Speaking of stuff that dries up… if you have not gotten to the far side of menopause yet and have lady bits, boy howdy have you got a big ol’ surprise coming! The skin in this precious area starts to thin and complain and, well… Sahara. There are creams you can buy to make it better, I am told, but I am cheap and stubborn old woman and wow:

As the kids say, “LOL, what??!” Fifty-nine dollars???? An OUNCE?

As the kids say, “ROFLMAO, what???!!” Sixty-eight dollars and fifty-five cents?? I realize that’s a bargain since it is 2.5 ounces, but sixty-eight dollars and fifty-five cents?

Mind you, I am sure there is coming a time when I will cross the line into:

I never thought I would hire wonderful Vietnamese ladies to sand my feet on the regular because they are turning into furry skin slippers and yet, here we are.

Speaking of furry, what is with the facial hair? I understand the whole “estrogen is down so testosterone is higher than it was” math, but really, y’all? A couple of times, I had my entire face waxed and it was mostly effective and my, oh my, significantly more painful than having my eyebrows done. The worst part wasn’t the yanking away of the waxing strip but the alligator bird pick, pick, pick they do with tweezers to get the hairs they missed. My brain went into overdrive because it couldn’t decide whether to freak out over the pain or over the hovering of some a stranger’s face so close to mine for that length of time. At least, buy me dinner first, Jeez. Seriously, though, ow, ow, ow.

No, I’m not getting threaded. Just… no. That sounds like using an Epilady on your face. Some of you will no doubt be old enough to remember the Epilady. You surely can’t use Nair on your face because it smells bad enough all the way down on your legs. Really, what was in that stuff that made it smell so vomitous?

The best thing I can say about skin as an older fat woman is that the tattoos you got several years ago increased in value not only because of inflation, but also because they take up more fleshy real estate than they used to. The pretty little butterfly on my left bosom that my angelic babies used to try and pluck off of my bosom while nursing is now a pterodactyl-sized butterfly. Perhaps it has evolved into one of those huge death moths.

I don’t mind going quietly into that darkest night but, *sigh*, I do wish they could have made my skin get better as I aged instead of worse. You’d think that with aches and pains and dementia and hair loss and reading glasses and hearing aids they could at least spot us that one.