Flesh Creep
When my partner comes to bed, I tilt my phone to hide the screen. It’s not porn or my ex’s Instagram, or his ex’s either. It’s a video with a title in Arabic that Google translates to “Beauty is important, please join us.” The thumbnail I clicked is a still from the video itself, a closeup of a gloved finger pressed into rash-red skin—a cheek, maybe, or a chin. The pores around the fingertip are engorged, almost bursting, and serve as the backdrop for the centerpiece of the still: an opaque, brownish nodule of pus, oil, skin, and dirt speared by a needle.
Many of the acne-removal videos I watch are titled in languages I can’t read—Vietnamese (“Bước số một. Hành trình thay đổi cho chàng trai trẻ,” or “Step number one. Journey of change for the young man”) and Thai (“Mụn Đầu Đen Gần Môi,” or “Blackhead Near Lips”). Some are already translated for an English-language audience, like “Satisfying Relaxing with Sac Dep Spa” and “AWESOME FACIAL HIDDEN ACNE POPPING.” At the beginning and end of the videos, sometimes we see the technicians, usually women, smiling behind disposable surgical masks, waving a quick hello or goodbye with one hand and bracing a lancet in the other. In some videos, the room is cramped and sparse, but others take place in an open area, like a lobby, with chairs lining the walls where people wait for their own services.
It’s common that the viewer never sees the face of the client in its entirety, the camera zoomed in so tightly on a cluster of pores, and I appreciate this. It’s overwhelming to see so much of a person all at once in such a state of vulnerability, which, I suppose, is where my Venn diagram of zit-popping videos and porn overlap. I prefer to come watching only a mouth to a vulva and don’t welcome the introduction of other parts. The disassociation both kinds of videos afford me is impossible to maintain when the humanity is in constant reveal. In this case, satisfaction is achieved by way of piecemeal consumption.
In high school, I spent swaths of the day at home in the bathroom, shirtless, popping pimples on my face and arms and chest until the skin and blood vessels beneath were broken and the areas radiated red. My mother, too, spent hours on my back while I sat, hunched, in the shallow basin of the bathroom sink where the light was best, my forehead pressed against bent knees, with achy, pubescent breasts tucked behind forearms and elbows. It hurt; for hours, it hurt. I don’t know the right language for it—obsession, compulsion, addiction, masochism, self-harm. I stopped wearing short-sleeve shirts and tank tops, the skin at my triceps perpetually splotched and sore, the scars on my back like a connect-the-dots puzzle or map of the stars. It tapered off at some point, I think, when I moved into the dorms freshman year, unable to isolate for hours undisturbed, and no good light anywhere anyway. With no one to work on my back, I took to scratching at the ones I could feel, my arm twisted up behind me in the shower or after dark in my extra-long twin bed. That’s still how I do it.
Until the rise of Dr. Pimple Popper, I didn’t know acne (cyst, limpoma, milia, ingrown hair, earwax, etc.) removal was a mainstream fixation. I thought it was niche, maybe even my own thing, in much the same way that, at age six, I thought I’d discovered masturbation, only to find out shortly thereafter from my mother that everyone does it, and it’s a sin. I saw an episode of Dr. Lee’s show on TLC once; it was playing on the flatscreen behind my nail technician during a manicure, and I was desperately uncomfortable at the public display of something I’d previously only done in private. Maybe it was a sensory clash of the moment—acetone and topcoat; the phantom sensation of the stubborn give and release between fortified fingernails; the sudden emergence of shit from just below the surface, the ooze of a blackhead, spiraling.