Crunchy Perimenopause, Part 1: when your skin is all of a sudden worse than it was as a teen…

I took my last birth control pill today for the next six weeks. Wish me luck 😬😬

I’m not even off the damn pill yet, and yesterday, I get a HUGE, nearly marble-sized lump deep under my skin on the right side of my chin. It’s been awhile, cystic acne.

This is after getting diagnosed with roseacea for the first time in my life a few weeks back. I have the kind where the cartilage in your nose hardens over time. Good grief.

Now, you may or may not remember back in the days before South Korea started exporting their skincare lines, and long before the zit stickers everyone wears now, there was “crunchy skincare.”

Essentially, you were one of two kinds of teen in the 90’s when it came to your skin - Neutrogena, or Proactiv. Unless you were in the much smaller third group that bought their soaps (likely Dr. Bronner’s) and lotions (likely Jason or Kiss My Face brands) from the local food co-op when they went in to buy their tofu and hummus.

And the clerk at the co-op likely told you about this:

Look, I didn’t name the clay 😬😬

So, you mix a couple of pinches of the bentonite clay with a couple of drops of raw apple cider vinegar, and apply it to whatever you want to draw impurities out of in a thick paste. You then let the paste dry, usually 20-30 minutes, before soaking it off with a warm, wet washcloth.

You can see that sonofabitch through a quarter inch of mud mask.

That first go-around brought the lump closer to the surface, and condensed it down, made it firmer to the touch. I’ll do it again before bed, and again tomorrow morning if I need to, until it’s fully drained. It doesn’t usually take more than three go-arounds to clear out a big zit this way.

Not that I haven’t been known to pop a zit and use kojic acid soap on the resulting scar for the next six months…

No one ever told me that peri/menopause was like if good Spock were puberty, and Evil Spock were peri/menopause… puberty in a mustache doing nefarious things. Why did Judy Blume not write a sequel to “Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret” some 10 years ago about this?

And next up, once the Pill is out of my system, is periods 😭😭