face rant

Woe is me. Maybe it’s age or the change in season, perhaps a prolonged period of ill health accompanied by bucket loads of stress but my face seems to have lapsed into some sort of a congested bumpy, flaky, desiccated, big pored mess recently and I DON'T LIKE IT. I've been privileged enough to have had a very well behaved face for a very long time. Even through my torturous adolescence I scraped through with the minimal level of facial explosions, none of that hideous scarring or use of evil paint stripper style acne potions for me, just well behaved, even, dewy (or DOOEY as Penelope Cruise pleasingly puts it in those adverts) skin which has never really needed more than a minimal amount of coverage to looked reasonably human, leaving me to freely play with glittery eye shadow, flicky eyeliner and industrial amounts of lip gloss.

As time wears on I’m aware of some fine lines around my eyes and slight drop in the ability to bounce back if I’ve been burning the candle at both ends, but I don’t really have a problem with that right now. Admittedly I’ve always been slatternly when it comes to cleansing and toning properly, but I’ve religiously used serum and moisturiser containing SPF all year round for over a decade, I exfoliate properly once a week, and slap on a nourishing mask every so often, drink plenty of water and eat relatively healthily. The problem is I’m never really sure what to do if my skin freaks out for a prolonged period of time- is it all downhill from now on?!

I’m currently I’m a bit torn between my usual laissez faire approach i.e. continuing the usual routine in the hope that it’ll sort its self out or perhaps staging some sort of dermatological intervention and seeking out a good facial – not an easy task as I feel like most of the facials I’ve had in the past felt a bit like I was paying for the luxury of someone cleaning your face in a way that feels quite nice, rather than a process by which you invoke some sort of magical change to your skin (without getting all invasive with scary fillers and Botox and stuff). I had a treatment once where the facialist plugged a metal thing into a machine and proceeded to roll it over my skin giving me teeny electric shocks*, it wasn’t really unpleasant but being honest I have no idea what difference it made, anyway I might be wrong perhaps I should be getting someone to prod, scrape and hoover out my face regularly but I don’t know if my often precarious bank balance would agree. I’ll stick it out a bit longer and if things really don’t start looking better seek out the holy grail of facials to make me look dooey again...wish me luck.


*Sometimes I make erratic decisions, this was one of them.

image via FGR