no YOU’RE so vain

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Skintervention

What is going on with my skin lately, friends?!?!

I am having some serious skin drama, is what.

It’s tempting for me to blame everything on the bottle of Kirkland-brand body wash I bought the last time I was at Costco. (It was obviously enormous, and also there were two bottles per package, so it was not my smartest purchase.) I tried the body wash and noticed the next day that my legs were itchy and a little bumpy. So I didn’t use it for a few days, on the off chance the body wash was causing a rash. When I used it again, sure enough: RASH. And this time, my legs were so intensely offended by the body wash, I got an immediate flaming red, itchy, bumpy rash all over my legs. It took more than a week before the rash went away; I had to pull out the big guns, which is a tube of high-intensity corticosteroid that makes my skin both greasy and sticky. 

Fine. Body wash induced leg rash is one thing. But now I am having a rash on my neck and something is going on with my face. It’s not a rash, but it is itchy and there is redness and a lot of teensy breakouts.

I used to suffer from eczema, when I was a kid. As a result, I am very careful about what I put on my skin as it is extremely sensitive. But I have had several decades of little-to-no trouble, so I don’t know that this is eczema. I suppose I don’t know that it ISN’T eczema, either. But I cannot find a cause of whatever is happening.

I swear to you that – outside the Kirkland-brand body wash, which I used for three days – I have not introduced anything new. I have been using the same face oil I’ve been using for at least half a decade now. I infrequently wear the same amount and brands of the same minimal makeup I’ve always worn. I wash my face in the shower with the same Clean and Clear face wash I’ve been using since the early aughts. I haven’t changed perfumes or body lotions or laundry detergent. I have been washing my sheets and towels regularly, in the regular detergent with the regular moderate amount of regular fabric softener.

Okay, I have had a good investigative think, and there are two other things that are new-ish to my life that could be potential culprits:

  1. New-ish Medication: I changed birth controls – a decision my insurance company made for me, when they decided out of the blue that they no longer wished to cover the bcp I had been on for MANY YEARS. I hate it, thanks. It’s not quite as bad as I anticipated (I have had some scary times with oral contraceptives in the past), but I do fall into a pit of despair for about a week each month, and also my skin is overall much more blemish-y than it has been in the past. But I started this new medication in April? May? Awhile ago; seems unlikely it would be causing an issue NOW. 
  2. New-ish Skincare Routine: I have been trying for months now to transform my “skincare routine” to a more environmentally sustainable one. I feel so ashamed to tell you this – but I am going to tell you anyway, on the principle that no one is perfect, and that each of us has room for improvement – but my skincare routine for the past few years has been a nightly regimen of wiping my face with a disposable Neutrogena wipe and then wiping my face with a disposable Noxzema wipe. I know. I am cringing so hard. Then I would slather my face with face oil. The end. This was an improvement, skin-wise, over my previous routine of leaving all the dirt and makeup on my face while I slept and then only washing it off in the shower the next day. But! I am horrified by all the waste this routine produces, so I have been weaning myself off of it. Change and I are not close friends, so the weaning process has involved many months of me a) looking into alternatives and b) reading other people’s recommendations and c) adding products to my online shopping cart(s). I finally procured some reusable facial pads and my husband (I think?) bought me a reusable face wipe. After trying them a few times, I realized, first of all, that I have no idea how anyone washes their own face without getting water EVERYWHERE but especially down their sleeves, and secondly, that I needed something on which to stow my pads and wipes. So I bought a little stand-up towel rack on which everything hangs. I have been using Pond’s cold cream and Neutrogena face wash, and I have been pretty regular about it since around September I think. But again, that’s nearly two months of no issues, so I can’t see why this new routine would suddenly bother me. 

This is all to say: I do not know what is going on with my skin, but I hate it so much. I have resorted to slathering my entire body, including my face, with Eucerin. It’s so light and so soothing that it doesn’t seem to exacerbate the issue, but nothing – NOTHING – seems to be soothing the itch. Not even my old buddy Benadryl. And I’m sitting over here with an itchy, broken out face and neck with lots of red blotches and scaly patches and I don’t know what to do. 

Perhaps I could call my dermatologist, but… a) I don’t think I will be able to get in to see him any earlier than January, and I already have an appointment for then, and b) I am afraid he will just prescribe Retinol again, which he suggested when I complained about my face several years ago. I cannot do Retinol; it is agony. 

So I am hoping that you, my dear Internet lovelies, have The Magical Solution. Or at least have some Skin Drama tales you can tell in commiseration.

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Friday Randomosity: I Hate Mud and Phone Calls Edition

Meal planning, grocery store reports, and randomosity. Seems like that’s all I can dredge up for a blog post these days. Thank you for reading anyway.

(Perhaps you could use one of your over-long randomosity bullets as its own blog post! you might suggest. Ah. If only my brain were capable of processing posts in manageable bite sizes instead of epic book-length tomes.) 

  • I finally got my hair cut and colored this week. My original appointment was a month ago. But the day before I was scheduled to see her, my hair stylist canceled because she had Covid. And then the day before I was rescheduled to see her, I thought I had Covid. My hair was very, very grey and now it is very, very brown and I am deeply grateful to my hair stylist. This time, she also dyed my eyebrows. You will have to trust me when I say that I currently look exactly like Uncle Leo. (The dye has temporarily adhered to the skin beneath my brows, and my hair stylist promises it will wash out in a day or so. Until then, I say, “Hello!”)
The resemblance is uncanny.
  • (This is not a new bullet, but WordPress disagrees.) Aside from the absolutely ridiculous name, I love it. It has the base primer, which makes my lashes super long. And then it has the top layer. And it’s waterproof so it never runs or smudges. It is a little difficult to remove, but it stays on so well I don’t mind. Since we are all wearing masks for the next FOREVER, it is my new best friend. I wore it skiing the other day, when it was snowing so heavily that my family and I were human moguls by the time we reached the top of the chair lift. And I made the mistake of putting my goggles on top of my helmet, where they immediately became crusted with snow and ice, which rendered them completely unusable, so I had to spend the rest of the day with snow flying directly into my face. My mascara did not budge.
Yes, that is a sliver of my actual forehead. Titillating.
  • Who was it that recommended I watch Sex Education? My husband and I just finished Season 2 and I love it. The first season was good. I wasn’t crazy about the premise: Otis, son of beautiful sex therapist Gillian Anderson, starts offering a sex advice clinic of his own at school, with the help of prickly bad girl Maeve. For the entirety of Season 1, I had to suspend a LOT of disbelief, and plus the advice that Otis charged for seemed really basic – like no one could simply google their issues and get the exact same solution? But the characters were interesting, and I became Very Invested in a couple of the side stories, so we went straight into Season 2. And it was GREAT. The cast of characters are so fun and interesting. Everyone is complex and has their own inner struggles. I love how diverse the cast is (although there could be a little more size diversity), and I love how plainly and non-judgmentally a wide variety of sexual preferences are portrayed, and I love the friendship between Otis and his best friend Eric, and I love Gillian Anderson even though her character can be kind of irritating. Anyway: it is a really different, interesting show and I am hoping my husband will be up for jumping right into Season 3. (This may sound like “no, duh” advice, but if you aren’t interested in seeing/hearing about pretty graphic sex acts, I would skip this show.)
  • Has it been cold in your neck of the woods? It’s been cold here, but nowhere near as cold as it COULD be. I grew up in the land of Minus Sixty Degrees, so I am pretty blasé about our current in-the-teens temps. We do have some pretty serious icicle action going on though. These guys are all come at me bro and I want to say, Whoa, whoa, whoa. Chill out, my dude. No need to get so defensive.
These are two separate icicles from two separate sides of my home. Which is apparently ready to defend me from enemies.
  • Where I was originally going with the previous bullet was that my office is quite frigid lately. I used to have a space heater, one that’s so old I can’t remember when or how or why I acquired it. It died last year. Is it still sitting forlornly in the corner of my office, mourning its inability to fulfill its life purpose? Yes. Despite my sympathy for the defunct space heater, I decided to buy a new space heater and I found this little guy. So far, I really like it. I park it in the middleish of my office and direct it toward my desk, and it definitely makes the space warmer. I think it would be perfect for a cubicle or a small office. It has a little handle, and it is very sensitive to being bumped, and I really like it. It’s little, too – about the height of a hard-bound book, and a very cute little fella. Because as we all know, cuteness is a key factor in which space heater to buy.
  • Not that I’ve been in my office a whole lot this week. Even though I am supposed to be doing revisions, I have instead been traipsing all over hither and thither for all sorts of stupid appointments. Annual gyn appointment. Annual mammogram. Routine physical to establish with a new PCP. Hair appointment. Financial advisor appointment. PTA meeting about something I volunteered for. And then I just had to make a bunch of phone calls (UGH) to set up more appointments. Eye appointments for me and Carla. Dental appointment. Car maintenance appointment. Ugh ugh ugh. I hate being on the phone and I feel like my schedule is BOOKED for the rest of the year. 
Actual text between me and my husband. He is very accommodating.
  • May I complain a moment about the central scheduling system my healthcare provider has? I spent a very long time on the phone with a scheduler, trying to set up eye appointments for myself and Carla. And while I am grateful that I could call one number and get appointments for us both, with different doctors, I am… a little concerned. I explained my time/date parameters, and she found a time and a date. So I plugged them into my calendar on my phone. And then she said, “Okay, I have you scheduled on DATE at TIME.” But… that was not the date she and I had agreed on! So I asked her to double check it, and she confirmed the original date and time, in a tone of voice that indicated I should have been paying closer attention. And then when I scheduled Carla’s appointment, she said, “Oh, I have an appointment on the same day as your appointment – DATE.” But the date she said was not the date we’d agreed on, so I had to ask her to double check it again. Also for Carla, I picked a specific location near our house, and a specific time of day (after school, because the doctor will need to dilate her eyes). The scheduler set it all up, and then said, “Oh, I scheduled it for DIFFERENT LOCATION. Is that okay?” I said no, could we please find a date at the nearby office. And she said sure, and then offered several early morning times… when we had just discussed that the appointment needed to be in the afternoon. FINALLY we got it scheduled, and then she told me the date and time, and they were different from what I had just plugged into my calendar! It was a very confusing call, and I really, really hope that Carla and I are scheduled correctly. 

  • In my never-ending quest to find ways to use the bananas that eventually soften into mush before anyone (ahem, CARLA) eats them, I attempted a new recipe. It was a MAGICAL recipe, let me tell you. Elisabeth posted it on her blog, and it sounded ideal for my particular child: it contains oats (which she will eat RAW by the bowl), bananas, and chocolate chips. It also used dates, which I had on hand from the sticky toffee pudding we never ate. No liquid though, which I felt was surely a mistake. But no! As soon as I turned on the blender, the banana liquified and the ingredients morphed into a beautiful, uniform batter. I was generous with the chocolate chips. The cupcakes were so easy and seemed so wholesome. And none of my family members liked them. HUGE WEARY SIGH. [CLARIFICATION: They are not dry. They are perfect. If they didn’t have a banana flavor, which I cannot stand, I would have eaten them myself.]
I think they LOOK beautiful, but apparently they are “too DRY, Mommy.”

  • I need some advice about my “mud room,” even though I am pretty sure that my situation is un-fixable. As I have complained about at great length in the past, my “mud room” is a teeny tiny square of space between my garage and kitchen, with a shoe closet on one side. We come in through the garage, remove our shoes, toss them in the general direction of the shoe closet, and then enter the kitchen. It’s not great normally, but currently, with the deep snow we find ourselves in, it’s reached a fever pitch of untenability. Our feet are wet and muddy, so the floor gets wet and muddy. And there’s no easy way to remove one’s shoes and then step into the kitchen, so mud and dirt inevitably get tracked into the kitchen and then all around the house. I am zooping things constantly. I am spraying and wiping the floor constantly. And then, multiple times a day, the floor is a filthy mess again. Plus, the shoe closet is FULL. There is NO ROOM for all the snow boots that have assembled. The other closet, where I store the snow boots in dry weather, is too far away for us to reasonably store the boots in between wearings. And because some people like to wear normal shoes when it’s not actively snowing, I can’t simply stow the regular footwear in the other closet. I guess I could move SOME of the shoes, so that we could put our boots INSIDE the closet, instead of outside. But that still doesn’t resolve the Mud and Dirt issue. I would love to get a boot tray… but the “mud room” is so small that a boot tray would make it impossible to open the door. I don’t think a boot tray would fit inside the shoe closet, either. It’s tiny, plus we already have a shoe shelf in there, taking up most of the real estate. You will have to believe me that there is no In the Garage Solution, either; our garage is tiny, and there is barely enough room to squeeze past our cars to get inside. We cannot remove our shoes outside before we come in. So. Is there some obvious solution I am overlooking? Or is this just a Grit Your Teeth and Keep Zooping situation?
The reality is SO MUCH WORSE than it appears here.
  • This may be really silly question, but if you track your reading, and you also have children, do you track the books you read with/to your children? I track the books I read on Goodreads, and I never used to count the books I read to Carla. (Mostly because my husband is the primary bedtime reader in our household – his accents are MUCH higher quality.) But I have making an effort to read to her more often outside of bedtime, and we just finished Frindle and I tracked it. I mean, I read the entire thing. Out loud. So I want credit. Credit that matters literally only to me. 
  • By the way, have you read Frindle yet? It was seriously such a good book. It’s about a boy named Nick and his teacher Mrs. Granger. As part of an effort to distract Mrs. Granger from teaching/assigning homework, Nick decides to make up his own word for a pen (frindle), and then launches a campaign to make frindle the real word for an ink-filled writing implement. It was a fun book about how words come to be, and how students can make a difference, and how important good teachers are. My voice was wobbling all over the place as I read the last two chapters. It was really such a lovely, fun, moving book. Carla liked it too, but being a child and not a parent/former child, she didn’t fully understand the beauty of the Nick/Mrs. Granger relationship. 

That seems as good a note to end on as any. I need to go gear myself up to make yet another phone call and schedule yet another appointment. And then I have two meetings today. Blech.