Here Are All The Things I've Done to My Face.
There's at least one you didn't expect.
One of my favorite hobbies is thinking about what plastic surgery celebrities have done and critiquing whether I think it’s good or not. I like to text Kelly photos of people like Gisele Bündchen, Demi Moore, and Tom Brady with notes like “He did something to his cheeks. It looks good right?” or “That’s too much filler she looks like the puppet from “Saw” (not referring to any of these celebs with that dis, FYI, that was for someone else who will remain unnamed).
My dad was a dentist and he took great care to craft really beautiful reconstructions on teeth. In college, he dabbled in art a bit and I think some of the joy he found in dentistry, aside from gabbing peoples’ ears off while he worked on their teeth, was in sculpting and shaping teeth. I guess I see plastic surgery as sort of like that but on steroids. It truly is an art form that can be done really well or really, really badly. So it’s fun to ponder what celebrities have done to their faces.
Most of the time, less is more when it comes to cosmetic surgery. I go to a fancy gym in West Hollywood filled with way too many giant, disgusting filler lips and frozen foreheads. I think some people want others to see that they’ve had work done, almost as a blatant display of their wealth. So when I have criticisms for “bad” work, it tends to be that the person took it too far.
I’ve definitely messed up with “work” before and done too much. But luckily, it didn’t stick around long. I’m writing about this for a few reasons. Firstly, I love gossiping about “work,” even if it’s my own. Second, I don’t see anything wrong with plastic surgery and dermatological procedures. Third, I kind of think it’s annoying when people don’t own up to doing things like this then pretend they look the way they do because the “hydrate and moisturize” (though that does help for sure).
I have a deeply conflicted relationship with my skin. The summer before my freshmen year of high school, I broke out in severe acne that progressively got worse for the next five years and stuck around far into adulthood. My parents took me to a dermatologist in the Central Valley who took one look at me and put me on a hardcore medication called Accutane. If you know any teenagers who have severe acne, they’ve likely been put on Accutane. And I have never heard of one case where it didn’t work, initially causing a breakout but then eventually leading to clear, beautiful teenage skin.
Accutane seemingly works for literally everyone. Except me. I took Accutane six times over the course of high school and college, from age fourteen to age nineteen. Looking back, I don’t really know why my Stanford-educated, wildly smart dermatologist put me on it so many times but it for certain did NOT work. Instead, it caused large, cystic acne to form all over my face and shoulders. These cysts started at about quarter size and went up from there. They would form in places on my face that physically changed its shape. They constantly bled and were extremely, extremely painful.
I have a lot of bad memories from this time and the acne part was kind of the cherry on top. I get little flashes from time to time of friends coming up behind me and putting their arms around my shoulders to say hello, searing pain coursing through my body because my shoulders were covered in cysts, bleeding under my clothes. The juxtaposition of someone doing something so sweet that hurt so much was excruciating.
This experience was awful, but it wasn’t all bad. I think my sensitivity and empathy developed a lot during that time. And I also think I learned I had to use my creativity, wit, and sweetness to win people over because they certainly weren’t going to be friends with me for my looks. My personality is still that cystic acne kid’s personality, and I really like him now that I’ve grown to appreciate him. He was not once handed anything by default. He worked twice as hard for everything (remember, I had ADHD that went undiagnosed until I was thirty-seven yet still ended up graduating a year early from an Ivy League school). He also had really sweet, accepting friends who assured him they weren’t looking at his acne, that they were really seeing him. And that meant the world.
Freshman year, I started listening to Talking Heads and they had a song called “Air” I would listen to all the time, identifying strongly with these lyrics:
What is happening to my skin?
Where is that protection that I needed?
Air can hurt you too
It truly felt like at a time where I needed the most protection from the outside world, starting off at a very rural, very conservative, very intolerant school, the one thing meant to protect me failed. My skin became enflamed, opened up, and bled. I don’t think enough sensitivity is given to kids with acne - it’s often kind of joked about or treated like something gross that shouldn’t be talked about. But it can have a dramatic, lasting effect. It completely shaped the way I will see myself for the rest of my life.
I didn’t know I could be considered “attractive” until years after I started blogging. When I wrote farcical stories about beautiful, mean gay guys, commenters threw me in with them and told me I had the same privileges. Tough way to find out you’re not hideous, being called out for pretty privilege. I think I have a pretty healthy relationship with my looks now, mostly because I’ve been held accountable in that way and that has helped me know that when I critique myself I am also critiquing everyone else. My desire to be generous to other people about their looks and bodies has helped me be more generous to myself in that respect. I will always be hard on myself and want to be better in every way, including my appearance, but I also see that I have many privileges and am included and seen in ways many people are not. I don’t take that for granted because it wasn’t always true.
When I had acne, I was maniacal about keeping my skin clean and trying to clear it up. Still, people would give me tips like “Have you tried washing your face?” and “Just put some toothpaste on it!” Here’s a tip, don’t fucking tell kids with acne it’s their fault. It’s hormonal, genetic, and inherited. Being made to feel dirty by other people is part of what drove my obsession with my skin.
My acne started to clear up in my early twenties but stuck around until I was about thirty-two. And it was at that point that my energy shifted from maniacally trying to get rid of zits to trying to clear my skin of the gashes and valleys eighteen years of acne had reaped on my skin. I was thirty-five by the time I could afford to see a dermatologist about treating the scarring.
I have a really great dermatologist in Newport Beach. His name is John Laura and I’ve been going to him for seven years. If you live in Southern California and are looking for a dermatologist I highly recommend him. He’s the one who assessed my skin in my mid-thirties and he’s the one who’s been working on it ever since. In the before times, like before I was broke, I’d go to him twice a year. I’d go near my birthday in July and near Christmas. Fixing the scars, and the terrible memories they evoke, feels really healing and like the best gift to myself. I haven’t been able to afford to go for a few years now, but I will when I have money again.
And now, here’s what my click-baity headline promised. This is all the shit I’ve done to my face:
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