A Post about Moisturizer. Also: Dennis Hopper, The Mafia, Dragons.

When I lived in the dorms my freshman year of college, there was this girl who would literally sprint from the shower to her room in order to slather herself with the amount of lotion I use in a year.

The time between shower and moisturizer seemed to be of great importance to her, as if Dennis Hopper was hiding in a warehouse somewhere with a mic and a hidden speaker hooked up to her ear, saying, "Pop quiz hotshot. There's a bomb on a bus. You take more than thirty seconds to get yourself fully moisturized after exiting the shower, and it will explode. What do you do? What do you do?"

My friend Caroline, who had come to our college from Germany, used to watch this girl's panicked moisturizing ritual from across the hall with me, convinced that it was a strange American custom (maybe it is?). "What does she think is going to happen if she doesn't put her lotion on fast enough?" she used to ask in a cute, confused German accent. I just laughed and shrugged. Obviously, Caroline has never seen Speed.


But I digress. I used to judge this girl for her moisturizer obsession. I have dry skin, but I'd never tended to it with that sort of bomb squad urgency. In fact, I'd never given much thought to moisturizer at all, except to grudgingly apply it on those special days that my face resembles the lava beds of Mauna Kea. This is probably because I grew up with three younger brothers (lotion=sprayable silly string alternative!), and because I'm lucky enough to have a grandma who supplies me with an industrial-sized vat of Clinique lotion every Christmas (I'm pretty sure they don't sell it to the general public, but my grandma's never been shy about mentioning our last name and whispering, "as in, the mafia").

And so it was with great trepidation that I finally tried a sample of SkinMD Natural Shielding Lotion. Sure, it had a name that implied a powerful forcefield and it was hypoallergenic, but what if my Clinique saw me using it? What if it was kind of joking about that whole hypoallergenic thing and it made my face bloat up and all my friends ditched me because this whole time they'd really only liked me for my cheek bones? What if putting lotion on is just really boring and I never want to do it? (Okay, that one's not rhetorical. It has an answer--yes.)

I ended up trying it on a patch of skin on my elbow that had become so dry and scaly I was seriously wondering when my parents were going to come into my room and tearfully break the news that I'm half Dragon (that would be the second weird-ass dragon reference on this blog, for the first, click here). I hid my Clinique vat to spare its feelings and decided to put a dollop of SkinMD on my dragon elbow (the medical term) once a night for however many years it took to cure it. In two nights it was visibly better.


So I started putting SkinMD on my face. It feels a little weird at first, because as the website is quick to point out, it's a totally different formula than regular moisturizing lotions, but in about ten seconds your skin gulps it up and you're left to rub your smooth, non-greasy cheeks and ponder if you actually put any lotion on or if it was all just a beautiful dream.

In the couple weeks since I've been using it, people have been complimenting my skin as if it were a fabulous new dress: "Is that new?" "It looks great on you!"