What Happens When You Put Your Face in a Box?
HINT: You'll cry about it every night
Back in my impressionable teenager days, the most important thing you could bring home from vacation was a suntan. The quest started before you even went on vacation.
Step 1: Purchase a package from a tanning booth and stop there on the way home from school every single day for the 35 days leading up to vacation.
Step 2: Once you built your base tan, sit in the sun every single day from 8:30-5:30 until you look like a vintage rugby ball.
Step 3: Visit the tanning booth at least 13 more times when you get home to really seal in those UV rays.
It was hugely stressful trying to ensure you CAME HOME WITH A DEEP, DARK SAVAGE SUNTAN. I had to be the MOST HEAVILY PIGMENTED PERSON IN SCHOOL or I might as well just eat a handful of boogers or say no to alcohol at the homecoming dance like a LOOOOOOOOOOSER!
I remember my brother and I pasting our red hot faces against the car windows on the way to the airport in attempt to soak up every last drop of poison our beloved fire star overlord could deliver. We wanted our money’s worth, South Florida!
And then what to wear on your first day back at school? Couldn’t be white because that would be too OBVIOUS and PICK ME VIBES. But couldn’t be a dark color because then your tan wouldn’t POP. The struggle was SO real.
Now fast forward a handful of decades later when the effects of Young Shelly’s baby oil-shrouded Floridian Spring Breaks started to surface.
Literally.
One day I stumbled into a skin care event at a department store. I was immediately ambushed by a girl in a lab coat.
“Let’s analyze your skin!” she said.
“No thanks!” I said.
“You’ll get a free gift!”
I had some time to kill and she was wearing a lab coat so I thought why not?
Let me tell you how much I love a free gift:
When my brother and I were teenagers, we ran around to all the department stores in the mall filling out credit card applications just so we could collect the free gifts. We came home with a 64-piece Tupperware set, novelty-sized chocolate bars, branded golf umbrellas, a teddy bear whose fur immediately gave me an allergic reaction, and a bottle of Exclamation perfume. Our mom accused us of shoplifting and was so relieved when she realized our haul was simply the result of her teenagers acquiring $45,000 in credit.
Before I could say okay to the Lab Coat girl, she shoved my head into a white box and clamped a curtain around my neck. Deliberation equals consent in the beauty world.
Inside the box was a mirrored device that transported me to the 10th level of hell. What holy nightmare Christmas Carol bullshit scenario had I inadvertently allowed myself to fall into! This was no skin analyzing box! Lab Coat Girl had launched me head first into a massive distortion in the space time continuum. In whatever upside-down parallel universe I had been transported to, the mirrored me was not living her best life. The face I saw reflected looked like the love child of that horrific Lady Elaine puppet from Mr. Rogers and a cat’s anus.
“WHO’S FACE IS THIS?” I shouted at Lab Coat Girl. “WHO IS THIS PERSON?”
“That’s you, sweetie!”
“GET HER AWAY FROM ME! Unclamp me this instant! I WANT TO GO HOME! PORTAL, TAKE ME HOME!”
“That’s hidden sun damage,” she said, placing her hand on the back of my neck. The hand was not for comfort! The hand was holding me down! The hand was forcing me to face my face! “Except it’s not always hidden. In some cases.”
She laughed when she said that last line. SHE LAUGHED!
“But what are those around my eyes?” I screamed
“Crow’s feet.”
“And THOSE THINGS on my cheeks?”
“Sunspots.”
“What about those holes? They’re huge! How did I not notice big, gaping holes on my face?”
“Those are your pores. Shocking, right? Look how clogged up they are!”
“GET ME OUT OF HERE! GET ME OUT OF THIS BOX!”
She gently tugged on my shoulders, signaling I had reached peak trauma and could remove my face and neck from the box. But it was too late. I saw what I saw. The psychic wounds were as deep as my pores and no amount of retinoid or pomegranate extract, or available credit could reverse it.
But I was willing to try. I bought everything she was shilling.
“You must have had some gnarly burns as a kid,” Lab Coat Girl said as she rang up my purchases. “And those pores are only going to get bigger with age.”
I could practically see the zinc oxide dancing across her dewy complexion. Has this girl ever even seen the sun? Her face and neck would never look like the surface of an exploding planet.
Gnarly burns indeed. I told her about the first time I visited Florida. It was May and hot as balls and my mom left my brother and I in a pool all day while she flipped the Bain de Soleil stained pages of a Jackie Collins novel and drank vodka drinks with the other moms ignoring their children. The only time I got out of the pool was to pee and admire the cool new freckles spreading across the bridge of my nose.
“Look Mom,” I said, casting a shadow over her face like a big red eclipse. “I have freckles!”
“You’re blocking my sun,” she said. I jumped back in the pool.
Those cool new freckles turned into giant, welty blisters about six hours later. My brother’s lips and eyes swelled up which turned out to be a blessing because unlike me, he didn’t have to see the his epidermis melting off his skeleton. The only salve for our flaming skin was the ooze dripping out of our weeping blisters. It was oddly cooling. I looked like a skirt steak by the time we got on the plane to come home.
Young Shelly had no idea of the fear that would fill her future heart upon seeing the beginning of a tan line or a new freckle.
Young Shelly had no idea how hard it would be to return from a South Florida vacation an even paler shade than before she left.
Young Shelly had no idea what it would feel like to have a dermatologist use a #2 pencil to lift your butt cheek so she could search your blanched, sallow undercarriage for suspicious moles. Doctor, I assure you. You are sticking that pencil where the sun definitely don’t shine. (And I know there’s a better #2 pencil/NUMBER 2/butt cheek joke I’m leaving on the table, but I trust
will pick it up and run with it.)At the end of the day, aren’t we all just masked skin suits hiding our internal damage? Some of us were just smart enough not to let a teenaged mannequin a lab coat force us to see it.
Young Shelly would be surprised to know that I see the damage she caused every day in the form of those freckles still spreading across my cheeks and nose. But I don’t cover them because it’s a nice reminder of that bubblehead girl who willingly fried her skin off and dyed her hair orange with Sun-In two days before her mom made her and her brother get professional photos taken. Also because I don’t know how to use make-up.
Young Shelly may be a dumbass, but she’s my dumbass. And no one puts Young Shelly in a box.
XO,
(Not Young) Shelly
You Read This Far So You Get a Special BONUS!
Anyone remember that episode of the Brady Bunch when Peter was trying to earn extra money by selling some whack hair tonic that dyed Greg’s hair orange right before graduation? That’s what I looked like in those stupid pictures and my mom paid a lot of money for them so she insisted on displaying them!
Thank you to my brother for excavating this family heirloom and sending me a picture of the picture for this very important research project:
It’s uncanny right?
First, thank you for your confidence. There’s definitely lots of fertile ground in the #2/#2 arena, but there are a couple of other directions I’d like to pursue if that’s okay:
1. “I don’t know what you have in mind doc, but that ain’t a pencil sharpener.”
2. “While you’re at it, could you see if my car keys are under there?”
This was so f’ing funny. I can’t tell you how hard I lost it at “The face I saw reflected looked like the love child of that horrific Lady Elaine puppet from Mr. Rogers and a cat’s anus.” That box sounds scarier than the one in “Seven.”
Memories from my childhood ! Tan lines = success back then. Had to get the base tan, right? Tanning beds and the little decals. What was I thinking
I think I had your exact hair cut and style when I was 15!! I used peroxide on my permed hair!