Grandma's Skin Care

Don't be influenced

I follow a few Instagram influencers who pepper their content with skin care. Very often, they are people whom I follow for their interior design or cleaning tips, yes, I watch people clean their homes, don’t judge.

I am a girly girl and I enjoy learning about skin care and make-up, but I confess to being baffled by some of the routines people advocate as being necessary for healthy skin. Maybe not even necessary but desirable. I can’t imagine a multi-step system costing a few hundred dollars being any better for your skin, and probably worse, than your grandmother’s routine of gentle cleaning and moisturizing. It just seems like a lot of chemicals. And it takes a long time. Who has time for t?his? Don’t you have to be somewhere?

Now, I know they are doing this for the camera and this is how they make their living, hawking these products, after all the links in this post are affiliate, and I make about $40 a year through my affiliate with Amazon. Enough to buy a book or two. Do they do these routines every day? Unlikely. The reason they do this is that we pony up and buy all this stuff. Why do we do that?

I’m not immune. I’ve bought make-up and moisturizer because I thought it would change my life. It didn’t and I found myself back to my old favorites.

Us older ladies are particularly vulnerable because between the ages of 45 and 55, our skin changes dramatically. The feel of it, the texture, the lines, and the craters that begin to appear. Recently while sitting in church waiting for Mass to begin, my oldest daughter started rubbing one of my eyebrows. “What are you doing?” I ask. “Instead of lining your brow, you drew a line in one of your wrinkles,” she said.

One of my wrinkles?????

What great news! Not only am I a wrinkled hag, I am also too blind to see that I am drawing random lines on my face. Thank heavens for the oldest daughter for setting me straight. In public. Humility thrust upon me.