Exfoliation

Do you exfoliate, though?

If this query resonates within you, vibrating along pores, singing within your epidermis, then — good, you probably have bad skin.

Bad skin is like having a horrible sibling.

Something that comes to you from birth, which you can never truly remove.

If this sounds a bit extreme, it probably is, but I have big feelings about skin. Huge, gluttonous, thoughts. For several years, skin was all I thought about. It began aged fourteen. Spots along my forehead and under my chin. The acne was red and vibrant. Like an angry Aunt at Easter lunch. It goes like this.

Acne is:

Your constant companion. A childhood friend who, despite prolonged lapses in communication, always appears at your birthday parties. The family pet who never forgets your smell. The local postman. The bartender who knows your name. The people who, for some unexplained reason, never give up on attaining your undivided attention, the hand on your lower-back at the work Christmas party. Through new jobs and old apartments. When taking up smoking and giving up smoking. The bump on the bridge of your nose. A small and ugly object that sits on your bedside table for fifteen years. Your unacknowledged life partner.

Henceforth, there will be no more apologising about the extremity of these skin-related thoughts.

I’ve always had acne.

A primary component of having acne is checking. Checking your face for new bumps. Rating the level of your applied concealment. This starts out as a harmless mirror glance, then, an obsession.

The binary of avoiding looking at your face and checking your face is a strong dynamic. Opposites work together to get results.

For me, it was important not to check the skin in an actual bathroom mirror. These reflected surfaces were brutal. Too clear, too obvious. Good checking reflections: a microwave door, the panel of steel at the back of a stove top, dark phone screens, partially obscured mirrors on coffee shop walls, the darkened window of a bus in winter, friend’s reflective sunglasses in summertime.

The process instantly became obsessive and gradually became destructive.

Bad skin makes evaluation of what other people see a constant internal process.

Until recently, I would stand, by force of habit, at different distances away from my bathroom mirror — to check what people would see of my skin at alternate vantage points

Another component: the memory thing.

I can track stages of my life through the memory of how my skin felt at different times. This isn’t some quirky trait or life-hack gimmick. Skin is, quite literally, a string threading my memories together. A beaded necklace of cystic bumps.

The metaphorical capacity in skin is distracting.

In the same way that some people catalogue their life by the apartment they lived in, or the hair cut they had, my past self is divided between differing degrees of acne. I can remember the exact feeling of the skin on my face during different time periods.

While living in hot southern Germany, my skin was damp and thick with sunscreen. The feeling of heaviness on my face, at the end of a day, directly correlates, in my memories, with the dead-legged sensation of hauling up six flights of stairs in a residential tower block. Back in Dublin, my face tightened and prickled with irritation from the un-seasonal air. This uncomfortableness was mirrored in cheap coffees and essay sleeplessness. I waitressed one summer while taking a controversial acne drug. The texture of smooth skin on my cheeks, a happy derivation from the medicine, renders my co-workers and the restaurant’s clientele with a touch of nostalgia.

The level to which your internal picture of your physical self can retain images of your life is shocking.

Does this make sense?

The real truth about skin is that nobody cares. I knew that. The only person watching a breakout is yourself.

The problem with acne is that it’s really sore, if you have it bad enough. My chin throbbed and the layer of foundation on my forehead burned. Being in physical pain makes things feel bad. Painful, to be exact. If your face is stinging and tight all day it’s near impossible to think about other things, normal things, to focus when someone is speaking, to maneuver your perspective back out to the real world. It’s easy to curl up on the inside. When my acne was bad, my mind mirrored the obsessive closeness I employed while watching sore lumps brew on my forehead.

Having bad skin became a reason to be anxious. When, in fact, being prone to anxiousness was a reason to care about my face.

A sign that my skin was monitoring something different: the compulsive face-checking would come and go in waves.

Are you anxious about pimples or anxious about everything?

This is an important query in the journey towards perfecting a skincare routine.

Step one:

Cleanse.

It’s important to double cleanse if you’re wearing make-up, and to remove the cleanser with a warm face cloth. This ensures that dirt, grease and dead skin is lifted beyond your pores, leaving no trace of unwanted matter behind. It’s easy to strip your face of gunk. It’s difficult to strip your mind, watching the face being cleansed, of circling thoughts.

Step two:

Tone.

Toning refines your skin’s texture. It evens out any bumps along the uppermost layer of skin and it ensures that every last piece of debris is gone. It’s like the cleanser’s proof-reader, checking that everything has been left as clean and sparse as possible. Toner leaves the face feeling smooth and soft. It’s a balm against the pits and hollows. A soothing wipe. The restart button that you’ll need an ear-ring to press.

Step Three:

Moisturise.

If you don’t moisturise, especially with oily or acne prone skin, your skin will crackle up and tighten like a sunburn. Despite the never-ending oil that your face pumps out all day, after toning your skin needs a layer of man-made moisture to lock in its own natural hydration. This may seem counterproductive. You’re making something that is too slick, more slick. But, sometimes, it’s appropriate to fight like with like. Something like that.

I used to think that I could track my life by the quality of my skin. In reality, skin was tracking the curves of bad mental health throughout my early adult life.

It feels good, for me, to have good skin because it feels like I am in control of what is happening to me.

I love being in control.

Anxiousness is tied with control. Or, lack thereof. When, as a teenager, I felt that things were happening outside of my control, illness and hospital appointments, this anxious thought was born: if I actually find out what is happening, it will become true. In some disrupted logic, it then became imperative to not find out what was going on. By putting myself in a subverted position of power, the power of ignorance, I had a sense of control.

You cannot control having acne. Similarly, you cannot control everything that happens to you.

Having acne and feeling anxious are both experiences that agitate a lack of control — in your skin or, in your life.

When making this realization, it felt like my skin and my mind were conspiring against me.

But, that’s probably just an anxious thought.