It’s weird yet gratifying how often, as soon as I reveal my age, someone asks with eager excitement, “What’s your skincare routine?”
The implication is that I’m doing something which helps me maintain a youthful look, and that this can be passed on. My knee-jerk answer is it can’t. I don’t do anything. But that disappoints the asker, and I don’t know, maybe something can? There’s gotta be some genetic aspect, and also the environment – I live in an area where the sun vanishes behind thick cloud cover half the year. But on the odds something will be obtainable from my routine, I will be totally honest, in this blog post, because I do take care of my skin, just not… consistently?
On days I bike to work, I wash my face with Burt’s Bees facial cleanser. I like it because it doesn’t leave that soapy feeling, and I can’t dry my face super well in a public sink with paper towels. I also like that it comes in a squeeze tube. I use a very small amount, about a pea-sized smear, because I can’t rinse super well in that sink, either. This goes better when I remember to bring a washcloth from home, but I almost never do. Anyway, thanks to my smallness of amount, I’m on my second tube of facial cleanser in ten years! Okay, the pandemic probably helped with that, too.
After washing in the washroom, I change into my work clothes, start up my music and check my emails. Then my face feels dry, and I’ll moisturize. Lately I’m using a body lotion I bought at a local fair, “Do’Lore” from Honey, Scrubs n’ Stuff Skincare with baby powder, jasmine, primrose and goat milk. (It says “Not for face,” I just noticed.) Just a dab or two, smeared around the eyes and mouth. When I get random moisturizers, I take them to work to use after biking. Before this I was using something from a hotel. Moisturizer is moisturizer, right? And I always worry about the stuff in the hotel getting tossed out if I don’t use it all, so if I use any, I bring the bottle home. It takes me forever to use them up. I suppose I use about an almond-sized blob at a time?
When I get home from work, much sweatier because it’s uphill, I shower, scrubbing my face and body with a loofa and bar soap. I feel like bar soap is more environmental than shipping all that water in liquid soap. I also use hotel soaps, same reason as the hotel moisturizers. Come to think of it, if I really wanted to prevent waste, I’d be bringing my home soap with me on trips. Memo to me. I digress.
After drying off, I dab on some coconut oil. This is food-grade coconut oil I bought at the grocery store because it was much cheaper than the cosmetics-aisle stuff, and I once read that there are only two active moisturizing ingredients that work, and one of them is in coconut oil. Recently, I experimented with melting the oil and mixing it with this dried, leftover cream perfume. The texture comes out a little… sugary? But it melts as you dab it on.
My dab process is to rub my forefinger on the coconut oil to melt it, then I dab at the corners of my eyes and the corners of my mouth and rub in. If I feel any lingering tightness, I add another dab there.
I also have some shea butter I bought at a fair because it smells EXACTLY like the inside of Passport to Peru, one of my favorite stores. Sometimes I use this instead of the coconut oil, though it’s a little harder to melt. I scoop a bit with my fingernail, set it in my palm and rub vigorously until it’s melted, then I rub my hands over my face.
On days I don’t bike to work… I don’t do anything. Sorry. I get up, put on clothes, go to work. I come home, do home-things, go to sleep. I shower about once a week, when I don’t bike to work, usually because I notice I’m stinky and my hair is getting butter-y. I know this makes me kinda gross. My husband says he cannot BEAR to go a day without showering. It’s what you’re used to, I guess. When I was a kid, we were forbidden from showering more than once a week.
After my regular non-biking showers, I also dab the coconut oil on me, after I dry off and my skin feels like it’s getting tight.
What else? I get plenty of sleep, except when I have anxiety-induced insomnia. I exercise regularly, but only in biking weather. I drink a lot of tea? I’m notoriously bad about putting on sun screen and get at least 2-3 sunburns a year. But I do try to put it on when I’m at the beach or an amusement park.
There’s a deeper meaning to all this, but I’ll get to that later.
If there’s one thing that differentiates my skin-care from most women, it’s probably that I never wear foundation makeup? I only wear makeup on special occasions, like 3-4 times a year, and then it’s lipstick, eyeliner, and mascara, sometimes eyeshadow. I joke this is because I know where they go, but I have never felt foundation did anything for me , and it makes wrinkles more visible. I mean, if I did use make-up, I’d have to wash my face, and that would be more washing, more stripping off of the natural oils. Kind of like how I grow my hair long by not brushing it. The more you groom, the more you have to?
It’s not that I think wearing makeup is bad, it’s just that I hate that feeling of having grease on my face, and I’ve never been very good at using it, anyway. I know there are people who feel naked without it.
I have an identical twin, so it would be helpful to compare – such isolated variables! – but she has similar habits to mine. She wears makeup even less often, and I don’t think she moisturizes as often as I do, either.
I would estimate I spend less than twenty minutes a day on personal grooming. It probably shows. I’m a messy person!
So, if I’m so lazy with my skin now, was it something in my past that helped me stay relatively youthful-looking? I only started using moisturizer regularly when I was about forty. Before that, I was the worst. I barely washed, and I had the zits to show for it. (Perhaps, though, laissez faire works on skin?) And no, I don’t “hydrate.” As a bike commuter, I know I should bring a bottle of water for those hot days… but it’s more bother to remember in the morning than it’s worth it for the half hour it takes me to get home.
I didn’t used to wash my face after biking in, and I got zits. So now I wash my face when I get sweaty. And washing makes the natural oils go away and I feel that tightness, so I put on some oil. I also didn’t used to moisturize after my weekly shower, but as I get older, I feel that tightness, so I dab and the feeling passes.
I dunno. I am advocating strongly for laziness, I guess. I realize it’s not going to work for everyone. I’m fortunate to have pretty clear skin.
When I get a zit, I dab it with a cotton swab dunked in hydrogen peroxide. When I was in high school, my biology teacher showed us how peroxide can break down zits. After that lesson, I resolved to stop squeezing my zits and instead dab peroxide directly on them. I also stopped the over-drying I had been getting with Oxyclean as a teenager, resulting in early lines on my forehead.
Yeah, I dab peroxide, then I squeeze the zit, anyway, because I can’t help myself, and dab peroxide on the wound as I swear next time I will forebear. Another moral failing.
There’s this weird thing, where we women are taught that, like, appearance-maintenance is our duty? If you don’t do it, you are said to have “let yourself go.”
As though we were holding our appearance on a leash? Or confining it in a cage made of social expectations?
How marvelous, then, to let yourself free.
(This is the deeper point promised earlier.)
For every person who has gushed, “Do you not age? Is there a picture of Dorian Gray in your attic?” someone else has said, “So you’re, what, fifty?” I do look my age.
I discovered that I felt beautiful when I was at the Pennsic War, a two-week camping event I used to go to every year. “My skin is so great here!” I thought. Then I’d get home and find a zit on my nose. I realized it was simply that I had no mirrors at the war. Without my own critical eye, I was only exposed to the uncritical appraisal of others, who didn’t care that I had a zit on my nose.
So now, I pretty much avoid mirrors. Most days, I only see the one over my bathroom sink while brushing my teeth, my hair a mess, no care given to my appearance.
My skin is aging. It will age. I want to stop it, or at least retard it, but I know I really can’t. I went in for a facial before my 50th, and got my skin micro-derma-bladed, because I thought it would help prevent wrinkles. Every now and then, I’ll buy some mask or product to try, because I can’t quite let myself go, but the laziness prevails, and I do. I am letting my appearance off-leash, and it romps like a naughty dog through the world.
I feel the new looseness of my flesh, and I see the evidence of age in my hands or on my neck. I am not as old as I will be, happenstance notwithstanding. Maybe the real secret of looking young is not to look at yourself, but see yourself only as others do, at a distance, with no great concern to find the flaws.
