The Things We Do for Beauty

My face is simmering. It looks like I have deep purple zits all over my face. They're encircled in reddish-pink. I'm uncomfortable and counting the minutes I can go to the gym, hop on the treadmill, and take my mind off of this itchy-hot facial sensation.

I've had hyper-pigmentation for as long as I can remember. It's genetic. I remember sitting on the couch watching TV as a kid and looking at my mom's face and neck covered with skin tags. "Ewww, can't you cut those things off?"

Luckily, I don't have skin tags. If I had gotten a single one, I would have taken care of it as soon as it appeared. But I have what I considered mild hyper-pigmentation--small dots of dark discoloration on my face. Not a big deal. Even when I told people I wanted to do something about my face, most everyone said my skin looked fine. I didn't even think it was much of a problem until I went to Kaiser this morning. I thought I was going in for a simple consultation with a bag of clinical goodies to take home and use before bed. The two nurses both agreed that heat was the solution. Cauterizing the spots breaks them up, they scab, and eventually the brown spots fall off with the scab.

So my poor face was cauterized to death. I consider myself to have a high pain tolerance, but the burning sensation was so agonizing that my eyes watered and my whole body was sweating. During the procedure, the nurse asked me to turn towards her. I physically could not do it. "Oh you poor thing. I can see you're in pain. Well, we've got one side of the face done. You're half-way done, except...the other side of your face is worse."

I didn't even think my face looked that bad! But when we were through and she handed me the mirror, I felt like I'd returned to my teen days of acne. I'm counting at least 50 purple zits. Ouchie!