Drop Dead Healthy by A. Jacobs (books to read to increase intelligence .TXT) 📕

as they’ve gotten older, that they’ve started to exercise in earnest.

My childhood biases run deep, though. I often feel guilty that I’m spending so much time on my body. Shouldn’t I be busy improving my brain instead of my delts?

Chapter 17

The Skin

The Quest to Erase Blemishes

I’VE BEEN RESEARCHING THE VARIOUS OINTMENTS, chemicals, and sprays that humans apply to their faces in their quest for healthy skin. Or healthy-looking skin, in any case.

And it’s an astonishing list, ranging from the delicious to the unimaginably repulsive.

In the appetizing category: yogurt, lemon, walnut oil, honey, almonds, avocados, mint, and pumpkin. The foreheads in Beverly Hills are better fed than the average laborer in an equatorial nation.

On the other hand, people also pay to have an alarming assortment of bodily fluids applied to their face. A New York spa will spread bird excrement on your pores for two hundred dollars. Another spa will shine your skin with spermine, an antioxidant originally found in sperm that is now manufactured in Norway. Snail secretion facials are also available. Seems we haven’t come so far from Elizabethan times, when there was a fad for puppy urine skin cleanser.

Skin treatments are not a new trend. In the Old Testament book of Esther, the evil king needs a new queen, so he holds an American Idol–style contest. Every night, he sleeps with a different woman. But not before the contestant has undergone beauty treatments that last an entire year. Six months with oil of myrrh, and six months with spices. Which makes a half hour in front of the mirror before a first date seem reasonable.

In my forty-two years, I’d never put anything delicious or disgusting on my face, apart from suntan lotion and face paint during camp color war. Why should I? I figured my skin can take care of itself. Don’t micromanage.

But recently I got paranoid that I’m the last man in modern times with no skin-care regimen at all. I was in the Penn Station bathroom before heading off to Philadelphia, when I overheard two guys talking. Leather jackets, Harley tattoos, belt-obscuring guts. They were either bikers or overzealous undercover cops.

“The sun is fucking killing me. I’m moisturizing like crazy. I’m using every fucking thing. I’m using fucking aloe. The whole thing.”

The other shook his head in sympathetic exasperation.

As part of the project, I have to take care of my skin. Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in the world. There are two million cases a year in the United States alone, according to the American Cancer Society. And on a more superficial level, as my Penn Station friends can tell you, your skin broadcasts your age. So this month is the month of skin.

Smoothing Things Over

But what skin products to apply? Skin care is estimated to be a $43 billion industry, and the quackery level is astoundingly high. Doctor and journalist Ben Goldacre gives a thorough lashing to the skin cream industry in his book Bad Science. Manufacturers throw in scientific-sounding ingredients like “specially treated salmon roe DNA.” If your skin actually did absorb salmon DNA, Goldacre points out, you might grow scales, which would appeal to a niche group.

The skin-care choices are dizzying. But Goldacre writes that unless you have a skin problem, one moisturizer is almost as good as any other. For now, I’m using my wife’s Aveeno lotion.

Wrinkles are a different story. Of all the dozens of wrinkle-preventing options, just a few actually work. The most established: tretinoin, known more widely as Retin-A. This acid helps the skin retain collagen, the elastic material. It might even have health benefits in addition to the cosmetic ones. According to The New York Times, it’s been used to treat precancerous skin cells. Studies show that after two years of use, abnormal cells returned to normal.

At my request, my dermatologist prescribed me a tube of Retin-A. It’s absurdly expensive—eighty dollars for two ounces. I decided to submit a claim just to give the insurance guy a good belly laugh.

I started spreading the thick, white lotion around my eyes and forehead. A week. Nothing. Two weeks. Nothing. Third week . . . something? The fourth week, definitely something.

The deep cracks around my eyes remained, but the little crevices filled out, like an inflating balloon.

It wasn’t a placebo effect: I asked Julie.

“You look younger,” she tells me. “It’s weird.”

“You can borrow it if you want.”

“Why?” Julie says. “Do you think I need it?”

Huh. This is one of those Joe Pesci–style “do you think I’m a clown?” questions. There’s no winning. You end up backpedaling and being shot in the foot with a Glock 19, if only metaphorically.

Julie did borrow my tube, and it backfired on her. Her skin got all red and puffy. “You’ll have to deal with wrinkled old me,” she said as she gave me back the tube.

I went back to dabbing it on each night. I watched the tiny dents in my face erode like a handprint in the rising tide. I spent an embarrassing amount of time in the mirror studying the skin around my eyes. I never thought of myself as being concerned about mini wrinkles. Who cares? They add character, right?

And yet, it’s an astonishing feeling to watch such a clear cause and effect. Apply cream, wrinkles vanish. It’s like Photoshop, but in real life.

Then I started studying the rest of my face. What else can I fix? What about that chin? It sort of flows smoothly into the throat, creating a combined chin/throat: a choat.

Or maybe my slightly asymmetrical nose? Maybe I should get that fixed.

I snapped out of it after a couple of minutes. I remind myself that vanity is more addictive than most Schedule IV drugs.

I can see how this quest for physical perfection might slide into insanity. How a reality-show star can have forty-three plastic surgeries in a month and how author Alex Kuczynski can sustain a whole book on beauty junkies.

Plus Retin-A has other downsides. It makes skin more likely