Dr. Self-Love or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love BB Cream
A meditation on acne, teenage angst, and misogyny
My favourite Radiohead song for a long time, just like every other pretentious edgy 13 year-old who 1) only wore black in public, 2) watched Stanley Kubrick films¹ way before they understood what the hell was going on, and 3) had only just discovered Radiohead, was ‘Creep’. The first time I heard Thom Yorke half-sing, half-sob Your skin makes me cry into his studio microphone, my angsty, newly-pubescent teenage mind was inexorably attached².
Little did I know that the same lyric would eventually become even more relevant in my later teenage years, when acne launched its full-on, late-bloomer onslaught on my forehead, cheeks, jawline, temples, and sometimes — painfully — even on my nose. It’s appeared pretty much everywhere it can on my face. At 19 (almost 20), it still does (some of it’s decided to migrate onto my chest now), despite my best efforts.
The only effective ‘remedy’ so far — at least psychologically — has been makeup. Believe me — I’ve tried everything. Nihil sub sole novum. I had a phase, lasting several months, in which I adopted a nigh-religious skincare regimen that was more ritual than routine, consisting of about 7 meticulous steps every night before I go to bed. Name a skincare product and I’ve probably tried some version of it: I’ve tried everything from your friendly aloe vera sleeping packs and yogurt sheet masks, your tea tree oils, and your charcoal clay masks, through to your crappy salicylic acid grapefruit scrub washes, your benzoyl peroxide creams that make my face feel as if Satan himself was pissing on it, and even desperately rubbing Colgate on an offending pimple the night before senior prom.
I’ve seen doctors and dermatologists, one of whom has prescribed me what were quite possibly dangerous doses of Vitamin A; I’ve been given courses of antibiotics that have made me run to the nearest toilet. I’ve tried radically altering my diet after being told to avoid dairy, fried foods, chicken, and sweets (basically anything fun). I’ve been told to drink more water, more green tea, less orange juice, and have dutifully done so. I’ve been told not to stress out (impossible!). I’ve been given skincare products for holidays and birthdays because everyone knows my face looks like shit. I’ve poked, prodded, popped. I’ve Googled, WebMD’d, r/SkincareAddiction’d. I’ve done it all.
At this point I don’t merely struggle with acne, I’ve become an expert on it. Short of actually risking the demise of my (already-at-risk) liver via getting an Accutane prescription (which I’m still too broke to afford), I know acne’s ins-and-outs intimately.
And, of course, I know the ins-and-outs of waking up every single morning and hating the red, scarred, sad excuse of a face staring back at me in the mirror.
Acne or no acne, though, I’ve hated my face either way. The thing is, I didn’t have a severe acne problem when I first heard, and resonated with, ‘Creep’: like many other teenagers, I got a few pimples here and there, every now and then, but certainly to no devastating extent, at least not to an extent where I couldn’t bear to even go to a convenience store without concealer on. But I already had a deep-seated hatred for my body, and most especially my face, long before acne decided to fuck everything up.
Growing up, I was told to hate how I looked. Family members and peers, and of course the media, wildly obsessed with Eurocentric beauty as it is regardless of where you’re from — but that goes without saying—had a lot of unsavoury things to say about my facial features. Here they are in alphabetical order for your convenience:
My cheeks = too fat.
My cheekbones = not high enough.
My eyebrows = too thick.
My eyelids = don’t have enough folds.
My forehead = too wide.
My jawline = not defined enough.
My nose = too big.
My nose bridge = too flat.
Only my eyes and lips were spared the onslaught, but I wear glasses (which, unfortunately, do not confer me ‘hot nerd’ status; additionally, I’m not even going to begin on the racist ‘chinky’ eyes insult), and as for my lips, I guess they looked acceptable enough up until the moment I opened them, when my crooked teeth and the braces that attempted to straighten them for 8 years straight would be exposed (which, as you can imagine, took a hit both on my ability to smile wide in school photos as well as bite into corn cobs at family outings).
Growing up, I was told to hate how I looked.
One can only imagine just how much things took a turn for the worse when the already-absymal state of my self-esteem got compounded by the very visible, and very red, effects of acne. At age 17, acne accorded me a blessing by fire.
17 is a tough age to be, though pop culture tends to make us think the contrary. Impossibly attractive 17 year-old fictional characters in movies and on TV (usually played by actors who are actually way older than 17), actual 17 year-old deity-like social media influencers, and modern music help construct this romanticised impression that 17 is the prime of our lives. And maybe it is, for a lot of people.
I, however, beg to differ. I could write a whole other story on how a number of not-too-pleasurable, traumatic life events during that year in my life shattered me psychologically, but I’ll spare you the gory details³. Suffice it to say that having a crater face akin to a pizza pie certainly did not help my already-messy situation. Every new eruption — metaphorical and literal — that emerged, as well as the subsequent scarring, jabbed at my already-non-existent, dependent-on-gloomy-indie rock self-esteem. At 17, the world had given me a gigantic, heaping dose of Reality Medicine. 17 was not turning out to be the time of my life as ABBA promised it would.
The usual (or at least most acceptable) pattern for most people is that they get really horrible acne first, during their early- to mid-teens, and then get rid of it in their late teens, thus resulting in a beautiful metamorphosis from awkward adolescence to attractive adulthood; and if not attractive, at least acne-free. My body, being the problematic hormonal mess that it is, decided it was a good idea to subvert the trope. Not long after my 17th birthday, my face started developing a most wonderful texture not unlike the surface of one of Jupiter’s moons, Io.
Fast forward to Christmas 2015.
I’ve so far suffered over 3 harrowing months of severe acne by this stage. Much tears, blood, and pus has been spilt. Thankfully, my godfather, himself a veteran of the noble acne struggle, knew about my predicament. I still remember the restaurant that he and my family were dining at when he handed me the meticulously gift-wrapped box that contained what would quite possibly save my life for the next 2 years and counting. I still remember the dish I was eating at the time (Chinese fried rice and sweet-and-sour pork); the music that was playing (fittingly, Michael Bublé’s rendition of ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas’); and, of course, the intense, agonising stab through the heart when I opened the present and realised my Christmas gift that year was makeup, which finally cemented the fact in my head that my face had major issues and needed correcting.
Lots of people underestimate just how devastating acne can be on one’s self-esteem; my godfather, having personally gone through the lows of acne himself, thankfully did not. He understood that going out in public, going to class, hell, even going to the convenience store bare-faced, was the last thing I wanted to do. So he gifted me BB cream. Manna from heaven that I’ve been partaking in ever since then (amen).
So, if you’ve ever seen me without makeup, know that that is solid proof that I’m extremely comfortable around you, because I still wake up every morning not liking what’s staring back at me in the mirror. I still have a nigh-obsessive skincare routine, I still try to order soy lattes at Starbucks (as well as limit the amount of times I stress-eat ice cream during exam season, but no promises), and I still wear BB cream almost religiously. I know none of these can really completely patch up my deep-seated self-image issues or my equally deep-seated acne (which I’m beginning to suspect is a hormonal issue, in which case, I’m fucked), but they do help me psychologically, at least. Especially makeup.
Unfortunately for me, and for all women, people have incredibly horrible, misogynistic opinions about women and beauty; since time immemorial, women — whether or not they are deemed attractive — have been portrayed as deceptive, and this supposed deception trait has, among other things, been attributed to makeup ever since makeup’s been around. One of the more recent sentiments was this terrible meme that went viral sometime during my first round of acne flareups: it went along the lines of ‘Take her swimming on the first date’.
It’s this fixation on a woman’s physical attributes — privileging her attractiveness as the pinnacle of her worth as a human being — which may (but not necessarily, and not always, and certainly shouldn’t) cause many women to wear makeup in the first place. We are pressured to look a certain way, to possess certain physical attributes (most often Eurocentric ones) so as to be accepted by a heteronormative, patriarchal society — to please men.
I couldn’t bear to even go to a convenience store without concealer on.
So, when we decide to wear makeup or get plastic surgery, we are demonised as deceptive — as if the reason we wanted such modifications rests solely on men. Sadly, it often could, to some extent. As a woman, it’s difficult to delineate between internalised misogyny and empowerment. Whenever I wear makeup it’s a constant mental battle between Am I doing this for myself or am I doing this because I want to please others? and, to wax philosophical, To what extent is ‘doing this for myself’ an extension of ‘doing this because I want to please others’?
After the past couple of years and counting that I’ve had severe acne, I’d like to think that for the most part, I’m wearing makeup for myself. Woman or not, everyone deserves to not feel like shit about their face. Alright, so maybe part of me subconsciously wears makeup because I don’t want people to think I’m as ugly as I already believe I am, and maybe that implies that I’ll never be able to fully cast out the internalised misogyny in me. I don’t know. But I am trying my best to view the application of makeup as an act of self-love, and I’d like for others to respect the fact that — cheesy as it may sound — for me, makeup is not really a mask, but more like a sort of armour that I wear in order to protect myself from the hurt that I would receive otherwise.
The ideal, of course, is that people shouldn’t think I’m unattractive because I have acne. One could argue that acne doesn’t necessarily make people look unattractive, and though I might be inclined to agree, the rhetorical question of whether or not acne makes someone unattractive is not for me to resolve. Functionally, and on a practical level, I know that it makes me feel better not to have pimples on my face, or at least look as if I don’t have them, especially since the world is neither ideal nor acne-positive. I can’t make people — awful and judgmental as we can be as human beings — accept me for my acne.
At the very best, people will quietly assume all sorts of shit about you just because you have zits, and then hopefully let you get on with the rest of your day; or you might just get unlucky and some of them might even straight-up tell you to your face that they’d rather be single than date a girl with a pimply face⁴. And though it hasn’t happened to me yet, studies have shown that you might even get rejected at a job interview just because your face isn’t as clear as the next candidate’s. Though I’m probably not a Hobbesian⁵, even I have to admit that it can be a cruel world out there, and as such, we’re all entitled to defend ourselves. One of my favourite methods of defence just happens to be makeup: BB cream, concealer, foundation, what-have-you.
I shouldn’t have to explain to anyone why I choose to wear makeup or why I want to hide my acne. It should be pretty obvious that nobody wants to feel like they look unattractive. It should be pretty obvious that nobody deserves to hate themselves. It should be pretty obvious that everybody deserves to feel some form of self-confidence.
So, the last thing I want is for someone to tell me that the reason why I’m wearing makeup is so that I can deceive others, or that wearing makeup makes me shallow, or desperate, or whatever. I’ve had enough painful servings of reality as it is, enough hits on my self-esteem throughout my youth to last a lifetime. Ever since that fateful day my godfather gifted me BB cream, I’ve been putting on makeup almost every day, putting on my battle armour. And it hasn’t been easy.
What people don’t know, or choose not to know, is that it’s taken me (and certainly a lot of other people) a lot of thinking and energy to get to this place where I’ve finally accepted that it’s okay to use or even like makeup. The constant internal debates I’ve had about the extent to which I’m using makeup in order to ‘serve the patriarchy’ are confusing, intense and burdensome enough. It’s a hot mess, and even I don’t fully understand or know where I stand in that debate. I don’t need people to add to it by implying that I’m deceitful or shallow for deciding that I want to cover up the monster zit(s, if I’m unlucky) that had just erupted on my cheek. Makeup has helped me feel like it’s okay to start posting selfies on Instagram, and even realise, holy shit, I might actually be a not-ugly person. At the end of the day, I deserve to be fucking happy about how I look, for once; if makeup is what it takes to help me feel that way, then so be it.
One day I hope I wake up without acne, or at the very least (acne-ridden or not) without wanting to sing/sob along with Thom Yorke when he sings Your skin makes me cry.
Till then, I’ll do whatever the fuck I want with my face.
Notes
[1] My first one, as suggested by this article’s title, being Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).
[2] That is, until I discovered the rest of Radiohead’s discography. From then on my favourite Radiohead songs turned even darker and angstier. However, though no longer my favourite Radiohead song, ‘Creep’ is definitely still up there in the list of my top 3 favourite songs to drunkenly sing/sob to at karaoke.
[3] For now.
[4] I wish I wasn’t speaking from personal experience, but alas.
[5] I sincerely hope I’m not speaking too soon.
