Colonization
By my mid-teens, the microbes had marched beyond the t-zone to colonize my entire face. I came to believe peace would never settle on my skin. I envisaged solitary careers for myself: I would enter a monastery (were there secular ones?) or man an Arctic research station.
I found this same hurt desire for solitude in a fellow sufferer I once met in New Zealand. He picked me up while I was hitchhiking, and, as I clambered into his Range Rover, I had to suppress a gasp at the moonscape that cystic acne had made of his face and neck. My own eruptions shrank magically into insignificance and I felt like Leonardo DiCaprio must.
Desperate to demonstrate that not everyone would spurn him because of his lava-like complexion, I probably overdid the nods of comprehension as we talked and need not have guffawed at his every shy sally at wit. It emerged that he was a brilliant young geologist who had been granted financial freedom by Oxford University to study anywhere in the world. In New Zealand, I guessed, there would be few people to disturb him, and he could lose himself in the company of unrejecting rocks.
I, too, feared rejection and eschewed dating as leading inevitably to disaster. Surely girls would judge me on my skin -- and condemn me? At first, I put love off until some prospective, clear-skinned future, retaining only the faint hope that I might find some Papagena to my pimply Papageno before the tragicomic opera of my adolescence played out. And, to my astonishment, I did find that not all women looked at me and recoiled.
The release of accumulated sebum was, then, not the only pleasure of these years -- but it is the zitty person's undeniable, if unadmitted, compensation. Squeezing pimples sweetly combines relief -- from often quite painful swelling -- with vanquishment. Perhaps this is something best kept in the archives of my memory, but I would, during the day, at school, draw up a sort of war map of the proliferating acne enemies on my face, to which I would refer later, in front of the mirror, expunging fingers poised.
However, some pimples required more radical intervention. In one case, I tried to lance a stubborn mound upon my chin with a needle. The operation was unsuccessful, and I had -- adopting a folk technique imparted by my mother -- unwisely scorched the instrument first to disinfect it, leaving me with a curious and unwelcome pincushion tattoo just south of my lip.
War and Its Aftermath
That was not a procedure the dermatologist I at last consulted would have approved. He almost dismissed my acne as rating under five on his epidermal scale of one to 10 -- and I took his point, having seen the angry interfaces with the world of some of his patients in the waiting room. But his prescription did put a cap on the pharmacopoeia that, like most of the spotty, I had tried. A full inventory of my cabinet of unguents, powders, pills, abrasives and astringents would provide wry amusement solely for other such experimenters, so I will only describe the one the doctor ordered -- and the only treatment that really worked.
Retin-A, a liquid and cream derived from the vitamin, clears up acne, but only in the way that chemotherapy treats cancer or Drano rips through plumbing. I applied a nightly mask of the stuff to my face, gradually transforming it from an oily swamp to a red and flaky desert. Retin-A is no snake oil, but it is a cure that is arguably worse than the disease.
It is a permanent treatment and, within three or four years, it finally brought my skin off the boil. But spottiness leaves a legacy. I still distrust smooth-skinned people: They often lack character as well as pimples. And part of me remains forever blemished -- not only by light scarring and that odd tattoo upon my chin. A woman at a party the other evening remarked -- it might have been the light -- how lucky I was to have such clear skin. I felt like a fraud.•
Simon Busch is a London-based writer and broadcaster.
