This summer, due to a number of reasons (more on that later) I nearly completely ditched my skincare routine. Sure, I cleansed and used sunscreen. And that was more or less it. Did my skin throw tantrums? Did everything go haywire?! Spoiler: no, it did not.
‘Beauty’ means perpetually fixing things
My regular skincare routine is mainly obsessed with ‘fixing’ things. Hyperpigmentation. The occasional, hated, outbreak. Loss of elasticity. You know, nothing major, but still issues for which potential remedies exist. I see myself as pretty removed from societal pressure: I’m a middle-class white woman, and don’t work a job where I’m continuously under the eyes of people (or – maybe I do? Does being online count? Anyways.). What I’m meaning to say is: I don’t feel pressured to look a certain way.
I (exceptions apply, of course) mainly do skincare because I genuinely like it for various reasons: I do like the community, I do like that I’m basically learning science-y stuff every day (oh, why didn’t I do better at chemistry in high school?!) and I just like applying stuff to my face. I also like to write about it. So, this is where I’m coming from.
A blast from the (not so) past
But still, Bridget Jones’ Diary has been on my mind a lot, and mainly this one quote.
“Being a woman is worse than being a farmer there is so much harvesting and crop spraying to be done: legs to be waxed, underarms shaved, eyebrows plucked, feet pumiced, skin exfoliated and moisturised, spots cleansed, roots dyed, eyelashes tinted, nails filed, cellulite massaged, stomach muscles exercised.
Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary
The whole performance is so highly tuned you only need to neglect it for a few days for the whole thing to go to seed. Sometimes I wonder what I would be like if left to revert to nature — with a full beard and handlebar moustache on each shin Dennis Healey eyebrows face a graveyard of dead skin cells spots erupting long curly fingernails like Struwelpeter blind as bat and stupid runt of species as no contact lenses flabby body flobbering around. Ugh ugh. Is it any wonder girls have no confidence?”
I hated Bridget Jones when it came out. I hated the book, I hated the character, and later, I hated the movie. What I truly did hate, although I couldn’t quite articulate at that point (I was 19 when it was released) was the (spot on) picture of society at the end of the 90s it depicted. I HATED how Bridget tried, and tried, and tried to become a version of herself men could like by trying to become thinner, prettier, to stamp out every character trait to become more popular – for men.
And even if she gets the man, in the end, she never properly understands that the whole game is rigged against her, and that being moisturized and pretty won’t help her at all, and that the solution isn’t just ‘to be herself’. Funnily enough, in the years since, we as a society have indeed overcome some of those issues, and some have become clearer.
And still, from time to time I think about that quote and the self-optimization projects we start ‘just for ourself’. I mean, really?
Fix my flaws?! Change is possible
At the beginning of summer, I felt out of that love for skincare. We went through a major crisis, skincare and me (we’re now back together), due to a lot of false promises, sky-high expectations and my general tiredness to put up with any crap. And a lot of tiredness in general. And anxiety. Stress. You know. Life.
It became pretty clear that I could cut skincare out of my life pretty easily. I had still a line-up of blog posts I could release, so there wasn’t a problem with content.
And then I happily cleansed, gave my face a spritz of the Eucerin Hyaluron Face Spray, applied sunscreen (or moisturizer) and it felt great. It felt great just not to care what to use in my routine, if I should use Retinol, Vitamin C or Azelaic Acid today. Not to think about what my face might need freed up a wonderful ‘don’t give a fuck’ spirit I loved. (I obviously showered and washed my hair and also applied sunscreen to my body, but my body care routine is always much more streamlined anyway.) Why should I even think about a spot when it would go away anyways in a few days? Why should I obsess over every line, every hair, every mole?
And my skin, always temperamental, often bitchy, who loves the summer heat anyways (treacherous bitch) didn’t complain. It was normal. It behaved like always – it wasn’t particularly great, and it didn’t look awful.
Does your skincare routine serve you?
In the end, I started my routine again when I had a bit more brain space available (and also started with tretinoin which makes my skin the neediest baby that ever babied). And while I acknowledge that I could do that because my skin doesn’t have big issues generally, I do think my approach is valid.
Maybe even more so at the end of the year, when people are often a bit more introspective and question things in their life – does your skincare routine serve you? Or has it become a kind of machine that mechanically runs on and on and on?
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