THE LEATHER OUTSIDE IS FRIGHTFUL

No, I am not talking Christmas. I am not talking shoes, furniture, car seats or gloves. I am talking… skin; old skin, tired skin, skin that is definitely not like the skin I saw on the clerk at the store today. You know; the twenty-year-old goddess with the long flowing hair, perky boobs and immaculate, tight skin? Yeah, that’s her.

There is a huge industry designed to keep our skin looking like hers. I know, because I’ve tried a bottle of just about every one of them. I have used cucumber peels, apricot pit scrubs, moisturizers, creams, lotions, you name it, and yet, when I look in the mirror, it still crinkles at the eyes and wrinkles around the edges. So far, we’re just talking about the face. It doesn’t get any better as you move down.

Have you ever noticed how your skin starts to look like crepe paper? I have no idea why. You do everything the commercials tell you to do, yet you still end up with basset hound skin – skin you can pick up by the handful, let go and watch cascade back down. Your shins have ostrich skin, your ankles have that turtle-leg texture, your heels become the moisture-starved cracked clay dry-season African river bed, and don’t even mention the knees.

That said, you take some time to consider the skin. It is the largest organ of the human body. It protects everything inside, holding off the wind, warming us on a sunny day, feeding us vitamin D from the sun. It sweats, gets bruised, cut and mutilated on a daily basis. We cover it, rip hair from it, rub back our goosebumps, and, when we were younger, we panicked over it, examining daily for that sadistic Friday morning zit with the massive red circle and perverted sense of humor. Throughout its lifetime, our skin deals with every possible element, all the time fighting the valiant battle against womanhood’s arch enemy, gravity.

So, there is nothing else we can do. Pour a glass of wine and toast your skin, wrinkles and all. Wear those blemishes with pride. They are a badge of honor for all of us, testament of a life lived. Besides, unless you are independently wealthy or can find a myopic sugar-daddy who will pay some surgeon to get out the can opener to crank that stuff back to where it belongs (adding a bit of starch to the cleavage at the same time), you just have to accept what Mother Nature has in store for your skin. You can definitely curse her, but I don’t think she listens.