welkin (n.): the sky; the vault of heaven
My brothers and I didn’t wear sunscreen when we were kids. It’s not like we ever burned, or our parents did, or their parents did before them. I didn’t think about sunscreen much, but I was fascinated by evidence of its absence. I watched my friends slough skin from their noses after spring break, and I was too curious to feel disgust. I learned things, like how the patches of red blooming across overexposed skin hurt to touch. It was an actual burn! I thought it was just a figure of speech!
My only firsthand experience came after attending the Shaky Knees Music Festival, where I spent three 12-hour days festival-ing in the sun until my shoulders dappled and peeled. I remember brushing the flakes of me away in awe. I remember wondering if I should worry about skin cancer. The thought vanished pretty much the second it arrived, but it has been creeping back into my consciousness since 2018, with the rise of the overcomplicated skincare regimen.
The shift probably came from a collective fatigue from the boom of the makeup industry around 2015. All of a sudden, it wasn’t as cool to paint on a mask of matte foundation and carve out the corners of your lips and eyebrows with concealer. All of that was yet another trick of the beauty industry, convincing us that we needed more products to “express our artistry” and “unlock our confidence”—and it was all a lie!!!
What we really needed were different products, ones like niacinamide and hyaluronic acid, ones that made you feel like a chemist and a professional as you ordered them in bulk from The Ordinary and assembled an individual routine to target your particular imperfections. The beauty of these products, aside from the austere minimalism of the packaging, was in their invisibility. No one could know how much time or money anyone spent on their skincare routine without peeking in their medicine cabinet, which is hard to do when a beautiful woman with glass skin is breezing by you on the sidewalk. All you can do is stare after her and wish your skin just looked like that.
Of course, in that era, a lot of people were deliberately showing off their medicine cabinets (and their tiny refrigerators, with people kept buying specifically for their skincare for some reason instead of simply using the Big Fridge) by way of shelfies and skincare hauls and nighttime get-ready-with-me’s. A side note: how have we not come up with a less clunky way of saying that? Is GRWM really the best we can do?
I liked the pivot to prioritizing skin care over makeup for a few reasons. For one thing, I’m lucky to naturally have very good skin (don’t worry, I suffer in other ways), so it felt like I had a head start. For another, as a woman just breaking into her twenties at the time, I was grappling heavily with what it means to wear makeup and why we wear it and why men, for the most part, don’t.
I had a hard time reconciling my desire to apply it and the fun I had learning about it and practicing it and liking what I saw in the mirror with the uncomfortable reasons why I enjoyed it, and the level to which I sometimes hated what I saw in the mirror. My tastes, I knew, didn’t exist in a vacuum. So by focusing on skincare, I was focusing on health, which is morally better and therefore more cosmically valid than makeup, which, as we’ve covered, is a tool of the patriarchy. I could get an A+ in feminism and not caring about my appearance without having to admit that I actually cared very much about my appearance and wanted very badly to be pretty.
I did the necessary research in a newly renovated Starbucks in my hometown, nursing a comically large coffee that had been prepared by a guy who I now refer to as my creepy tutor (not because of the coffee; he had, once upon a time, been my math tutor, before he got creepy), and came to the conclusion that I didn’t need any of that shit. I already had great skin. I think I bought a toner, because I liked that it smelled like roses, and I patted myself on the back for winning.
And then came the laugh lines.
I was 20 years old and I was developing wrinkles! What the fuck!!! Everybody loooves talking about how black don’t crack and yet there I was, practically a babe in arms — and cracking. That shit was so fucked. Ironically, if I had deigned to look into the effects of using retinol, I would have seen that it was literally exactly what I needed, but I was too busy sliding further into depression and finding ways to interpret my crumbling appearance as evidence of some unforgivable moral failing. As one does.
Society has finally chilled out on the whole 25-product skincare routine thing, partially because overconsumption is out and partially because a solid proportion of the people on my various social feeds lives in NYC, where nobody has room for all that. What I see a lot of now are TikTok dermatologists laying out what they consider the true beauty essentials, a list that generally includes cleanser, moisturizer, some kind of exfoliant, retinol, and SPF. It’s a less intimidating routine than the ones of yore, and it’s okay to buy into, because it’s the doctor’s orders.
This is, of course, just a new way of saying beauty = frivolity and congratulating myself for not getting sucked in by the culture. It’s a little harder to parse, this time around, and I’m considering trying this new thing where I focus on the positives instead of berating myself for participating in A Society. I’m avoiding the capitalist compulsion to buybuybuy without reason, and anyway, it’s not like retinol is bad for you. It does increase the skin’s sensitivity to the sun, but even that is sort of a net good, because it has finally gotten me to take sunscreen seriously. I read years ago that although people of color are less likely to get skin cancer, the cases that arise are often deadlier. So I started wearing sunscreen on beach days, even if just on my face and my tattoos. But now it’s a daily affair — the days I go outside, anyway.
Even that, according to some people, isn’t enough. The cult of SPF preaches that one should slather oneself in the stuff every day, no matter what, because haven’t you seen that picture of that trucker? You can’t make Vitamin D through a window, but that doesn’t mean you’re safe.
Wear a hat, don’t tan, avoid windows, stay inside. Don’t take unnecessary risks. I get it, kind of. Skin cancer is a thing, as we’ve covered. Sun poisoning is, too (and as I recently learned, it’s not just, like, a little dizziness. It is fever and joint pain and fainting and vomiting. Not pleasant). But time in the sun is so precious in a world of email jobs and car-centric cities, and so important. Evidence has been building that sun exposure reduces risk of hypertension, cardiovascular disease, myopia, and MS. It can soothe the immune system and lower the blood pressure. And I’m expected to forgo all that for fear of a few wrinkles? With the way the healthcare system is set up in this country???
The recent-ish cultural aversion to sunlight reminds me of the way young black girls used to (or maybe still do? Little sister/cousin/niece havers please sound off) spend entire pool days under an umbrella or hiding under beach towels so they wouldn’t get “too dark,” like that’s a thing a person can be. It’s holding the kids back, instilling a fear of looking old before they’ve even finished high school. As Naomi Wolf points out in The Beauty Myth, it’s:
severing the bond between women and the natural world, turning nature into the fearsome enemy of the male tradition’s point of view . . . . [It] stimulates women’s fears of looking older in order to drive us in the opposite direction: indoors once more . . . the proper place for women in every culture that most oppresses us.
Is that a little dramatic? Maybe. But I hate feeling manipulated, and I love hanging out, so I will be gathering my huge picnic blanket and a Tupperware of diced mango and a book and a San Pellegrino and laying out in the park. Feel free to join me. Please bring a speaker, if you have one.
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INTAKE.
reading: Way too damn much. In a quick list: Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg, Blessings by Chukwuebuka Ibeh, My First Book by Honor Levy, and The White Album by Joan Didion, which elicited a “That’s so classy,” from my former boss when she saw me reading it as I waited for her to meet me for lunch. I hope she knows how bad I needed that.
watching: The Bear — I started this last year but fell off halfway through the first season. I picked it back up in anticipation of season 3 dropping last month, and I am genuinely beside myself. Ayo Edebiri if you’re reading this I am free this weekend and next weekend and the one after that and the one after that.
listening: Everything Doechii, but mainly “Spooky Coochie” and “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake.” The woman…the artist…the diva that she is…
&: I’ve gotten back into overnight oats, a summer breakfast classic (ft. peaches and mangos), and I’ve recently started making my own cold brew concentrate as I can’t be expected to make and then chill and then ice 1–2 cups of coffee every single day. I’ve noticed that eating a healthy, filling breakfast yields more energy than my usual practice of staggering around with an empty stomach until the afternoon. Do people know about this?
"morally better and therefore more cosmically valid" no cuz yeah
also those tiny skincare fridges drove me crazy
reading ur words feels almost as good as ur company- quite the feat considering how gud as fuck ur company feels
meet u in the park this weekend?