Since I turned 60, for every gift-giving occasion my friends give me the same thing—moisturizers. I don’t get it. They didn’t do this when I was 59. Did I suddenly stumble into some bad lighting that makes my face resemble a topographical map of Death Valley?
“You just look a little dry,” my friends say.
I have a drawer full of the latest promises of youth in a jar and sometimes a squeeze tube. Everything from: Night-Repair Eye Cream, Revitalizing Moisture Beads, Age-Defying Miracle Retinol, Timeless Skin Collagen Elastin Facial Whip, and Moisture Surge Intense Skin-Fortifying Hydrator Gel—For Very Dry Skin, which at 1.5 oz. proves that the longer the name, the smaller the jar. Then there’s Luminous Tone-Perfecting Advanced Anti-Aging Micro-Sculpting Moisturizer, which comes in a 50 ml jar. Cosmetic companies are now using metric measures just to confuse me. Hey, with this many choices; I don’t need your help to get confused.
My stash includes Daily Defense Cream, great if my skin gets attacked; Hydra Zen Renewal Cream, which doesn’t make me look any younger, but after some meditation I don’t care any more. There’s Anti-Aging Coconut and Avocado Oil Nourishing Cream, for when my skin gets hungry. And Seaweed Mattifying Cream, but now I think they’re just making up words. There’s even something called Snail Cream, because when I think of beauty, I think of snails. Because beauty doesn’t happen fast.
I must confess that I did purchase some of the moisturizers that are now living out their natural lives in my bathroom drawer because becoming old and dried up is just so difficult to accept.
Famous fake-super-model Dereck Zoolander hit this dryness nail on the head when he said, “Moisture is the essence of wetness, and wetness is the essence of beauty.” But I think that Roseanne Barr summed up this aging business even better when she said, “I’m wet where I should be dry and dry where I should be wet.”
So, I guess my friends were right. Beauty all comes down to moisture, which in the big picture means water, that comes from rain. This is why I blame my dry, aging skin on the drought, and ultimately—global warming. It’s those carbon emissions eating holes in the ozone that are making me look old. It’s the fault of fossil fuels derived from vast deposits of decaying dinosaurs which met their prehistoric demise from a catastrophic big-bang collision with a rogue meteorite caught in the earth’s gravitational pull, the same gravitational pull that is, as I speak, tugging at my face, pulling it into the desiccated mask that I no longer recognize in the mirror.
And this great cosmic joke is beyond my control because no moisturizer can defy gravity, even if it says it can on the label. So please, dear friends, save your money. As you can see, the magnitude of this problem is much bigger than 1.5 ounces.