What is Normal Skin and Normal Hair?
This blog is not about your ability to sto picking or pulling, but about what you expect your skin or hair to look like. I don’t need to tell you that this is a valid goal but a long journey – you know this yourself. In this blog, I would like to try and clarify one rather persistent and annoying idea about what it means to have normal skin and/or hair.
Perfect skin/hair
Nature isn’t acquainted with our human concepts such as perfect or even normality. One of my favorite philosophers, Richard Rorty, once wrote: „The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.“
In other words, what’s normal and even what’s healthy is something that we humans project onto our bodies, but it’s not something that our bodies know about, care about or strive to achieve. Smooth texture isn’t something that nature needs, nor are clean pores necessary for the proper functioning of your skin.
All these ideas about what our skin is supposed to look like come from ourselves or other humans through cultural conventions. These conventions are also quite skewed, so men are given a lot more freedom than women. That, I’m sure, comes as a shock!
I was looking for the definition of normal skin, and this came up:
“This skin is neither too dry nor too oily. It has regular texture, no imperfections and a clean, soft appearance, and does not need special care.”
If I go by this definition I don’t know a single person who has perfect skin. To begin with, that on Earth is “not too dry nor too oily”? About as vague as it gets. Skin that has entirely regular texture with no imperfections doesn’t exist. People have scars, moles, pores of different size, discolorations, etc. “Soft appearance” is another abysmal phrase meant to allow you to read into it whatever insecurity you may have. And “does not need special care” is true for almost everyone, but if you put it in the context of the rest of the definition, it’s not true for anyone.
See what I mean?
Call me cynical, but this is a definition made to sell you something.
The bottom line is that whatever ideas you may have about your skin, your skin doesn’t care about them. Whatever ideas you have about color, texture, density of your hair, your hair doesn’t care about it. Remember that, repeat that, until it sinks in.
Our bodies have evolved to survive, not to look pretty. Both your skin and hair have their own important biological functions to perform and that’s all that matters. Our culture will sometimes set standards that go against the way that our bodies go about performing their functions.
What does this mean for you practically?
It means that you can’t allow your imagination to run wild, making up the criteria for what your skin is supposed to be. You can only do what you can to have a healthy care routine and hope for the best. Things are not entirely in your control.
Set your own standards based on what you can control, based on the cycles you observe, based on patterns that you notice. Find beauty in what is, don’t chase after what ought to be.
Natural aging
When considering what to expect, aging is one thing that we can’t quite avoid. As we all get older, the quality of our skin and hair changes. Hair tends to lose some of its density and color, hair quality also becomes different. Hair strands become shorter with age too.
Hair graying often begins in our 30s. When your hair is dark it may be more easily visible but just because it’s more visible it doesn’t mean that you’re more “afflicted” by this than your blonde-haired friend. Male-pattern boldness, for example, becomes visible in most men while they’re in their 30s, mostly at their temples and the top of their head.
For example, when I was younger, I had oily skin and quite severe acne. Now that I am getting… less young… my skin is becoming dry. I don’t have acne and haven’t for years, but my skin is still not “perfect”, whatever that means. I used to think oily skin was hard to manage, but now I’ve discovered that dry skin also comes with its own set of challenges. Do I care? Not really. It’s the only skin I have so I adjust to it and move on. I know very well that my skin is not there to be perfect, but to contribute to thermoregulation, to help me communicate with my environment, to protect me from my environment, etc. Oily or not, it does its job well. I wasn’t always as OK with that, I don’t want to give you the impression that I’m the Dalai Lama, but I am OK.
If you already have to have an idea of what your skin and hair are meant to look like, you have to account for natural aging. Even if you stop picking or pulling tomorrow, your skin or hair won’t look today the way they looked twenty years ago. This is not your fault, this is simply the way aging works.
Things that can’t be undone
Years of hair pulling may leave you with bold spots. Typically, these changes are not irreversible, although when you pull for a long time, it will take a long time for bold spots to fill in and there’s no guarantee how long it will take, or if your hair will be as dense in those areas as it was before.
If you’ve been picking your skin, you could have some smaller or bigger scars. Some scars look like elevated lines, some may get infected and really swollen and painful. Other scars may look like little pits. With time, they will certainly change, become flatter, less discolored and less visible, but likely still there. Medicine hasn’t come up with a way to completely remove a scar.
When you consider what your skin and hair should look like in the future, it’s extremely important to factor these into your considerations, so that you don’t end up with more self-loathing after trying very hard. This brings us to something I’ve already alluded to: know what you can and can’t control. Without that, it’s almost impossible to form realistic expectations.
This may sound discouraging, and it is not my intention to make you feel that way. The opposite is true: accepting what you can’t control is quite a liberating thing.
Unrealistic expectations
Wanting to look like people look in magazines or on social media is bound to worsen your BFRB. This is, in fact, why I’m writing this. What we see isn’t always the truth. Do a simple experiment: compare your friends’ lives with what they present on social media. Or your own life. What we see in public is a highly curated and digitally enhanced versions of what are usually just ordinary lives.
We can set expectations that are too high or too rigid and then regularly fail to attain them, consequently worsening our self-worth and self-confidence, not to mentioning triggering even more picking or pulling. We can also set expectations that are too low and then even when we meet them, we can use that as a way to further validate low self-worth because we perceive that we can’t do more.
Because of this it’s incredibly important to learn to think for yourself and form expectations based on what is realistically possible. To get to this place, you may need to go through a mourning process, mourning for an ideal image you’ve internalized and nurtured over the years. And as big of a loss as that may be, it is worth it if what emerges is a more realistic beauty standard, one that you can meet and feel comfortable with.
Summary
We can reduce this text to three main points:
1. Beauty standards are made up nonsense. You don’t need societal made-up nonsense when you can create your own made-up nonsense. Your made-up nonsense, however, should be sustainable and shouldn’t make you miserable. While I’m here, that goes for nearly everything society dictates. Examine those rules and don’t be afraid to reject them when they cause suffering.
2. We can’t live a happy life if we don’t know what we can and can’t control. This goes for hair and skin as much as it does for world wars, economic crisis, raising children, growing plants, and many other things. Making peace with the highly imperfect world and very unfair circumstances that we sometimes find ourselves immersed in is not so much a goal, a destination, but an actual place from which we can start changing.
3. Embrace your messy, imperfect human nature.
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