Description

You could easily look more beautiful than you do now, it’s just that nobody has told ever you how to do it. Everybody will tell you not to do it this way. When you see beyond the conventional ideas about the skin and what it does you’re able to realize what you can achieve.Our thoughts about the skin are heavily influenced by illusions and assumptions that we either don’t notice or don’t question. First of these is the belief that facial skin is extremely sensitive and delicate, able to bear only the lightest touch, preferably from a professional. We don’t trust our own hands near the face and don’t use them for anything more daring than applying a serum.We’re able to think this way by mentally detaching the facial skin in from the organ that covers the rest of the body. The fact that we apply make-up to it and use it as decoration and part of our look has allowed for a further shift.in perspective. In the imagination of advertisers and beauty people the facial skin has become something different altogether, not just ‘more delicate’, but functionally dead, so that mistakes are forever, and the consequences of doing something unexpected to it don’t bear thinking about. Therefore we feel vulnerable and are very much in need of companies to formulate skin care and guide our product choices.This long-held idea of the dead facial skin persists and the beauty industry flourishes on it because the layer that over-the-counter products and salon facials have most effect on is dead, ready to be rubbed away over the following days or weeks.A moisturizer or a rejuvenating product will improve the appearance of this top layer of cells, but it can do precious little for the deeper layers that determine how we’ll look long-term. If a product could affect the function of the skin and have a significant effect on existing damage it would be a drug, like the prescription-only tretinoin (retin-a)But although the creams sold over-the-counter are relatively superficial in their action, we’re reminded of the expert knowledge needed to formulate them by the diagrams and chemical formulas that appear in the corner of the advertisements, little arrows pointing very definitely to some benefit going into or coming out of the skin, , and little equations comprised of things that sound impressive but beyond us. antioxidant x plus pro-retinvitamin y performs the miraculous repair known as co-wrinkle reverse z age-postponing serum.The same kind of scientific justification is found in advertisements for hair products, fabric conditioners or kitchen cleaners, and in every case what we’re looking at is the surface.We grew up with the image of the skin as the blank canvas on which make-up is applied, and from there we have somehow got the idea that it really is a canvas, a very fragile one that is always on the brink of falling to pieces. The image of the skin as dead cloth recurs everywhere in the beauty business.We accept the idea of older women being ‘well preserved’, as though we’re aiming, with an increasing lack of success, to recreate the face we had at 20 by means of applying moisturizer, as if the skin were a leather sofa.And we accept the assumption that facial skin can be pulled out of shape and rendered unwearable, like a woolen jumper. No it can’t, because it’s nothing like a woolen jumper. It behaves like other organs of the body, heart, lungs, and skeletal muscles, and it adapts to being exercised by growing stronger, or on the other hand, it responds to lack of stimulation and challenge with a decline in strength and resilience.It’s not easy to have faith in the skin when everyone feels they know with absolute certainty that you should never drag or stretch it. But the skin loves being stretched. It feels really good, just like stretching the muscles feels good in bed or at a yoga session. Nobody suggests that stretching the muscles will pull them out of shape. elasticity is the ability of the tissue to regain its original shape, not a dangerous business that causes the limbs to come loose.Once you begin to handle your skin with conviction you will feel it coming to life under your hands, and you’ll be delighted that you trusted yourself to reconnect with your own face rather than allowing the skin to lie inert and untouchable. At the same time you have the skin thickening and growing more elastic over the days and weeks.