I Feel Bad About My Neck, by Nora Ephron, was published in 2006, which was unfortunate timing for me because at that point I did not feel bad about my neck at all; in fact I was barely aware that I had a neck, being 26 years old and therefore still naturally as taut and dewy as an lightly oiled bongo drum. I idolized Nora as a writer but could not relate to her pithy essays about keeping her aging skin from pooling around her on the floor, as if she were melting à la the Wicked Witch of the West.
Ah, to be young.
As I write this I am rapidly approaching 44, which is really not that old and yet, skincare-wise, a very different landscape, as if I have skipped out of a technicolor Oz and suddenly found myself face-planting into the unforgiving hell-sands of Dune. My beauty routine at this point in my life can best be described as “a lot.” Each morning, I apply a series of serums and moisturizers that promise to smooth wrinkles, lighten dark spots, boost collagen, reduce pore size, prevent acne, target uneven skin tone, block UV rays, and finally broker world peace. I apply gel masks under my eyes to plump the nest of fine lines that accumulate faster than a hoarder’s unread newspapers. Twice a week or so I spend twenty minutes bathing my face in (supposedly anti-aging) red LED light, using a mask that looks like something Hannibal Lecter might wear at a Daft Punk concert. At night I douse myself in exfoliating acids, peptides—the function of which I could not explain if my life depended on it—and tretinoin, which, if my social media ads are to be believed, should Benjamin Button my face back in time to Obama’s first term. I finish with a night cream that I keep by my bed so that in the event I am crippled by fatigue from the rest of my routine, I can still protect my skin barrier during my coma.
The kicker is that all of this effort goes mostly unnoticed. No one has ever asked me what products I use, because apparently I do not glow. I do not have “glass skin,” the Korean ideal of a dewy, poreless complexion that is currently all the rage. I suspect that my lifestyle, which includes drinking more caffeine and wine than water, popping THC gummies like aspirin, smoking occasional cigarettes (I know, I know), and staring dead-eyed at my screen for hours before falling into the kind of sleep you might get on a turbulent red-eye flight might have something to do with this. Nevertheless, I persist.
Intellectually, I know that aging is natural and necessary (as the old saying goes, consider the alternative). As a feminist, I firmly believe that women should be not only allowed to look their age, but be celebrated for it. Still, if $5,000 dropped into my lap I would probably pay a good doctor to shoot lasers at my face until I looked like an order of steak tartare. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
According to my Instagram feed, which is now almost exclusively reels featuring “aestheticians” (they are wearing scrubs, I’ll give them that) who seem to take great pleasure in cheerful fear mongering, perfect skin can be yours if you simply:
Identify the 3-5 products among the roughly 200,000,000 that exist across thousands of brands that work for your unique skin concerns and apply them, in the correct amounts, in the right order, and in the right way (believe it or not it is possible to wash your face wrong!)
Stop frowning, smiling, looking quizzical, excited, or pissed off, sipping through straws, sleeping on your side, or letting your face touch the pillow (cue Mission: Impossible theme)
Refrain from touching your face with: your fingers, your phone, your hair, makeup, clothing, a towel, any other human or animal’s skin or hair, the sun
I even Googled “skincare mistakes,” and the one that makes the most sense to me is, simply, “skin.” If you happen to have skin, you are definitely fucking it up, that’s just a given.
But oh, my neck. I get it now, Nora. In I Feel Bad About My Neck, she writes that “according to my dermatologist, the neck starts to go at 43 and that's that.” This is proving true for me in real time; until about 6 months ago it seemed OK—as body parts go, fairly unremarkable—but now when I take selfies it looks like someone has photoshopped my reasonably-aged face onto the ropy, reptilian neck of Gollum from Lord of the Rings. Having become a legal adult during the precise window in which Ally McBeal brought neck wattles into the cultural spotlight, I know this can’t be good.
If you are a woman, you already know how pervasive and toxic the cultural messaging and sexualized shame around physical aging is, so I won’t waste your time explaining it. Instead I will give you my personal cultural touchstones that planted the seeds early on that would blossom into my deeply-ingrained belief that youth and beauty are the be-all and end-all of female existence. It started with The Hugga Bunch Movie in 1985.
If you have seen this movie, I’m very sorry. It has an extremely low production value and the talking dolls are terrifying from a modern day perspective, like Cabbage Patch Kids coated in a fine layer of cat hair and dosed with MDMA. But the part that stuck with me was the villain of the movie, a vain, evil queen obsessed with her looks who has to eat fruit from her “youngberry tree” every hour to stave off aging. When she actually eats the berries, she makes a face and says “yuck, yuck, yuck, I hate them, I despise them… but look at the complexion!” Then she asks the hero of the movie, a 7 year-old girl, if she’s had a face lift.
Next up, 1992’s Death Becomes Her. This movie is amazing and you should watch or re-watch it immediately (the only way it doesn’t hold up is an extended bit with Goldie Hawn in a fat suit). Meryl Streep plays a hilariously narcissistic actress who will do anything to reverse the signs of aging, up to and including drinking a potion that will make her live forever in a young body. “This is life’s ultimate cruelty,” the superhot witch/guru played by Isabella Rossellini tells her. “It offers us a taste of youth and vitality, and then it makes us witness our own decay.” Got it, 12 year-old me, skin blushing with the first hints of prepubescent acne, must have thought, sitting rapt in the theater: Wrinkles are worse than death.
Pimples were my first and greatest foe, so I spent the first two decades of my skincare journey dousing myself in salicylic acid and enduring repeated applications of St. Ive’s, the most popular scrub of the 90s, which I believe was made from real gravel. Luckily, my acne made me look young, but it persisted well into my thirties, so much so that I barely thought about anti-aging products until I started getting zits inside my wrinkles, like a toxic May-December romance on my face. Now I feel like I’m trying to hold back the advancing enemy troops from both sides, all while watching Gwyneth Paltrow rub her cheekbones with a $200 vibrating gold bar on some Instagram ad. What’s a girl (well, maybe not a girl, but certainly not yet a Golden Girl) to do?
Some would say, stop worrying about it! Age naturally and become a radical old bitch who does not give one single shit about the lines in her forehead because she’s too busy using her glorious brain and perfectly functional if slightly rickety body for higher pursuits on this mortal plane! And you know what, I think they’re probably right but I can’t hear it right now because I have my headphones on listening to a podcast about whether snail mucin—literally the trail of slime left behind by a snail—can get me that glass skin, finally.
Wish me luck.
I started using Korean skincare products (Cosrx - VERY affordable too) and I have to say, they know what's up. The snail mucin is...as good as they say. I try to ignore that I am slathering my face with the mucus of snails, but my skin looks better than it it has in years. I also get a weeeeee sprinkle of Botox for my Luke Perry forehead.
the neck though...