Why Are We So Ashamed of Our Acne?
Image Courtesy: Instagram
My freshman year of college, I actually looked forward to wearing a mask. Or, at the very least, the mandatory COVID precaution doubled as an effective tool to cover my face when I hated it most and started dealing with acne–just little blemishes here and there that suddenly bloomed like a garden one day. I felt gross. My self-esteem plummeted like I was back in middle school with braces and a secret Tumblr account. I couldn’t bear to leave my dorm without hiding my acne as best as I could, smearing big globs of drug store concealer on my face like clay, packing translucent powders and creams on top, all in a last-ditch effort to blur the unevenness you had to be blind not to notice.
As a result, I saw a dermatologist in Palm Coast and was prescribed some medicine. The spastic, stubborn spots eventually faded, along with the COVID restrictions and my embarrassment. My confidence came back, just like in the happy ending of a Proactive commercial. When I look back at pictures now, I feel relieved to not be constantly applying and reapplying benzoyl peroxide and clindamycin phosphate and whatever the hell else people told me to slather all over myself. I am left to wonder, though, why I had been so humiliated by something so uncontrollable. It was almost like I had believed some untold, elevated lie, that my disposition was an outcome of my own shortcomings, not just the result of stress that came along with moving out of the house for the first time.
I’m not trying to argue that acne is a stellar thing to experience. It can suck. Depending on how severe, it can leave you with all kinds of problems, with side effects like irritated skin, hyperpigmentation, and scarring. What’s worrying is that depression is one of those side effects, too. Why does this inflated shame always accompany a pimple or two? Where are these subconscious ideas, that acne ties into our self-worth, coming from? And who's benefiting from these narratives?
In 2023 alone, the skincare market globally was valued at over 109.71 billion dollars, projected to grow to around 194.05 billion by 2032. While skincare isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself, that number only works if we keep believing something is wrong, that these products will save us from whatever it is we're afraid of: maybe not a zit, but people thinking we’re unhygienic or unattractive, a story we can partly blame on representation in media.
Image Courtesy: Instagram
I do feel social media has made great strides in “normalizing the normal." Of course, you’re still going to encounter the hyper-unrealistic: the photoshopped stomach, jaw, and wrinkle lines. That’s unavoidable. Though, once in a blue moon, you’ll see some mom showing off her stretch marks from a recent pregnancy, a girl showing herself pre and post-Olive Garden to demonstrate the mundanity of bloating, or maybe you’ll catch a 2D illustration of a woman with unshaved legs on Instagram with a caption like, “Body Hair is Natural.” It’s a small part of the Internet, but I feel as if these kinds of displays, alongside the body positivity movement, have positively washed over into reality. The treatment of acne, however, still seems to be untouched (unless we’re talking about how to get rid of it), especially in television.
Rowan Elis, a Youtube commentator, says it best in her video essay, “The Ugly Truth of Acne Representation.” She comments, “Characters with acne are almost always either a nerdy teen or a bad person, whose acne seems to be used to show their rotten inside displayed to the world…In TV especially, we see acne, or more likely a single pimple crop up most often in single episode stories in teen and kids media, a one-off, world-ending blemish that will ruin your school prom or big date and causes other characters to regard you with disgust. The message is overwhelmingly clear: that acne makes you ugly and undesirable.” These kinds of storylines and gags are dramatized, but the themes are loud. The idea that this human thing you’re experiencing is unnatural likely sticks until adulthood. What needs to change is television and the media’s portrayal of these realities, not as the butt of a joke, but a part of life.
I say all this in the hopes that those dealing with the shame can understand where these wild ideas may have sprouted from. Not to sound like a greeting card, but your acne is normal and doesn’t make you any less beautiful. Over 85 percent of people deal with it at some point. What’s not normal is manually editing Daniel Radcliffe’s face in post-production of Harry Potter because some people believe pimples on a teenager are unrealistic (but flying around on a broomstick totally isn’t).
Strike Out,
Sophia Massebeau
Saint Augustine
Editor: Maya Kayyal
Sophia Massebeau is a Staff Writer for Strike Magazine, Saint Augustine. You might catch her busking downtown or apologizing for how messy her car is. You can find her @sophiamassebeau on Instagram or sophiemass1355@gmail.com.
