Word: blackheads
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...debt can lead you into ridiculous purchases: "My gym visits are now followed by eighty-dollar tennis lessons; my Dr. Bingblatz sessions are now followed by one-hundred dollar facial sessions, administered by a masked woman with a steam wand and a tweezer, who removes my blackheads one by one...I'm impressed that this service even exists. How do these leisure economy capitalists do it? How do they calculate the exact moment at which people are suddenly prepared to pay a hundred dollars for an hourlong blackhead-squeezing session...
...Then the skin care specialist says, "Now it is time for the blackhead extraction." She attacks me with a tiny blade, boring into my pores, digging out the dead skin cells and accumulated oil-basically, most of what makes up my face. Perhaps I'm not qualified to say this, but blackhead extraction is more painful than giving birth. Apparently when I checked off "sensitive skin" in the initial questionnaire, it also meant "please gouge out tiny holes from my tender flesh." I would have cried, but I was afraid my tears would bind to the moisturizer-soaked cotton balls...
Progesterone breaks down into androgens, Dr. Fisher pointed out, and these stimulate the production of sebum, the waxy substance secreted by the sebaceous glands of the upper trunk and head. These myriad, tiny glands are easily blocked by hardened sebum, which creates a blackhead. In its efforts to get rid of this plug, the body starts the inflammatory process, causing a pimple. Inside the pimple are blood and lymph fluids in which bacteria thrive, creating a pustule similar to a small boil. At the edges of big pustules, bacterial poisons kill skin cells and leave disfiguring scars...
They do know that pores of the face, chest and back, through which sebum oozes to oil the skin and hair, sometimes close up. Sebum, thus suppressed, pushes outward, forms a blackhead or a pimple...
...blackhead removers...