Oil checks were routine for me. I’m not talking about the kind you get every 3,000 miles. I’m talking about the kind you do every three hours. If you have oily skin then you, like me, probably carry around a package of dab sheets in your purse everywhere you go.
You collect napkins from restaurants and eateries just in case you run out of dab sheets. The fear of a greasy face is constantly in the back of your mind. You probably do face checks by every mirror, car window, heck, even spoon you come across on your daily missions. You curse hot, humid weather for everything from your frizzy hair to your freshly applied makeup, now deep-frying on your face.
You’ve probably even come up with real smooth ways to check your forehead for oil slick, like the “Oh it’s so hot in here” back-of-the-hand face-swipe followed by the subsequent inconspicuous “watch check”.
This doesn’t work so well in cold weather, but then there’s always the “Is that RandomFriendName over there?” complete with the eye squint to cover you just in case. Having been plagued all my life by the oiliness of my T-zone, I had a ready arsenal filled with inconspicuous ways to perform “oil checks”. I had just accepted that oily skin was my lot in life and I just had to manage it.
Until, one day, while lamenting about my “oil issues”, a co-worker of mine asked me, “Why don’t you try to get rid of that?” I looked at her like she was from another planet. After all of these struggles I’m telling you about, do you really think if I could just magically “poof away” these issues I wouldn’t already be on it?
She must have read my facial expression because her response was simple, and sincere, “I’m serious, on Youtube there’s all types of cures for things. You should just try to look it up.” I rolled my eyes and pulled out a dab sheet thinking to myself, Ok Miss Know-It-All, if it was just on Youtube they wouldn’t even sell these little handy wax paper sheets. I was done with this conversation, but when I got home from work later that night her words kept playing over in my head.
Finally I just convinced myself to go on ahead and look it up, couldn’t hurt. The first video I found featured a pretty girl that looked like she’d never had a pimple in her life, much less oily skin, and she spoke cheerily about how to get rid of oiliness.
Her suggestion was to ditch whatever lotions I was using and to use natural oils* to moisturize my face instead. I became livid at the mere suggestion. Who was this bimbo?
How could she suggest that I add MORE oil to my face? Heck, why didn’t she just suggest that I collect the oil on my face into a nice tub and just swim in it every day?
