Stephanie Edwards

Watch Me Visibly Soften My Mouth Wrinkles

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Three weeks ago I noticed a gap on the wall going up my stairs, where a photograph had been for eleven years, and it took me four days to work out who had taken it. About nine seconds after that to wish I had never found out. I am going to tell you which photograph it was and where it turned up, but none of it will make sense yet, so give me a minute first. I am fifty-eight. I live in Michigan, in the house we raised both girls in, and there is a run of framed pictures going up the staircase wall that my husband put up in 2014 and that nobody has touched since. Fourteen frames. Every one of them crooked in a slightly different direction. On a Tuesday I was carrying laundry up and there were thirteen, and a bare hook, and a rectangle on the paint that was very slightly a different color than the paint around it. Nothing else in the house was missing. Nobody had been in the house. That is what made it strange rather than upsetting. For about a day and a half I mostly found it funny, and I told my sister about it on the phone like it was a small mystery. The photograph was me at thirty-six, sitting on the end of a dock at my in-laws' place with Rachel leaning into my side, twelve years old and already nearly my height. My husband took it. I am not doing anything in it. I am looking down at the top of her head and the light is coming off the water, and it is the kind of picture nobody poses for and nobody throws away. It is also, and I did not think about this until later, one of maybe six photographs of my face that exist from that entire decade in any kind of quality. I was the one behind the camera for most of those years, for reasons I did not examine at the time and have examined plenty since. I found it on a Saturday. Rachel is thirty-four. She lives forty minutes away and I was at her place to drop off a slow cooker she had been asking for, and I used her bathroom, and it was propped up against the bottom of her mirror, leaning on the tap, the way you prop up a card. Not hung. Not framed on a shelf with her other things. Propped where you would stand. I stood in my daughter's bathroom holding a photograph that had been taken off my wall and I was angry for about the length of a breath. Then I looked at where it was sitting and I understood exactly what it was doing there, and the anger went out of me so fast that I had to sit down on the edge of the tub. She has been comparing. I asked her about it in the kitchen and she did not lie for even a second, which is very much her. She said she took it in July. She said she has been standing there in the mornings holding her own face next to mine, and that what she is trying to work out is when it started for me, because if she knows when it started for me then she knows roughly what she has got. She is thirty-four years old and she is doing the math on a photograph of her mother. And then she said the sentence that has been sitting on me ever since. She said, you were thirty-six in that picture and I am thirty-four, and your face in that picture is holding, and mine has already started to go. I could not be angry with her. I have tried, honestly, in a small mean part of myself, to find a way to be annoyed that she took something off my wall without asking, and there is nothing there. What is there instead is worse. Because I know precisely what she is going to do next, since I have already done it, at length, for about twenty-five years, and I know what it cost and I know what it bought. My own version started at thirty-three and never really stopped. Anti-aging cream to begin with. Then retinol, the drugstore tube and afterwards the costly one, on the theory that the cheap tube had been the error. Peptides. A vitamin C serum. SkinCeuticals on two separate occasions. A jar of La Mer that stayed in the cupboard because it felt too expensive to actually spend. The Ordinary, after somebody online assured me the dear ones and the cheap ones are identical inside different boxes. Twenty-five years of that. And the honest summary of twenty-five years is that my mouth wrinkles kept deepening, my nasolabial folds kept deepening, my marionette lines arrived somewhere around fifty and stayed, and the whole bottom third of my face kept quietly heading downward the entire time, on schedule, as though I had never bought a single thing. That is what I have to hand my daughter. That is the family inheritance. So after that Saturday I finally did the thing I had never once done in twenty-five years of buying. I stopped asking what I should buy next and started asking why nothing I had already bought had ever done anything. Two objections came up before anything else did. Botox is not a fraud. I had it at forty-six and it delivered precisely what was advertised, which is a muscle that stops hauling on a crease. Genuinely useful. Also beside the point for me now, because at fifty-eight nothing much is hauling on anything. What is happening is that the lower half of my face has begun travelling downward, and a muscle relaxant has no answer for a thing that travels. Filler is real as well, and it is priced like a car, with the single difference that a car stays yours afterwards. Filler is rented. The month you decide to skip is the month that becomes obvious. Then the cupboard. Everything I ever bought sits on the surface. Skin carries a barrier whose whole purpose is to stop things crossing it, and it performs that job on serums exactly as reliably as on anything else. Nothing I applied ever travelled down to where the collagen is produced. It could not. That is the entire reason none of it worked. This is not sulking about one disappointing label. No label solves it. What twenty-five years bought was an enormous quantity of product laid very carefully against the outside of a wall, with the collagen sitting on the far side of that wall the whole time. The treatment I eventually turned up is called Micro Infusion, and it is not another cream. It is a way past the barrier. It uses sterile, super-fine, 24k gold-plated microneedles, and it delivers a powerful peptide serum packed with bioactive collagen peptides and hyaluronic acid deep into the skin, and actually reaches where the collagen is lost. This process boosts your collagen production and transforms the look of your face from the inside out. Visibly diminishing the wrinkles and lines around your mouth, your nasolabial folds and your marionette lines. While visibly tightening and lifting the sagging around your jowls and your neck. Twenty-five years of cupboard could not achieve any of that, and whatever is launched next will not either, for the same reason as all the rest. None of it ever got past my own skin, and none of it was ever going to. Twenty-five years, and not one purchase ever did what it was sold to do. A dermatologist will perform this in-clinic for five to seven hundred dollars, and a single appointment is not how it goes. You book a run of them, and when the run finishes you are put on maintenance, which lands you on precisely the treadmill the filler puts you on. Essentially, this US skincare company has made the same technology available at home at just a fraction of the cost with their Micro Infusion System. The device is short enough to close your hand around. Press, lift, shift along, press again. Rachel reads things like this, so I am not going to oversell it to my own daughter. The first evening I used it my skin looked plumper, and it had a glow on it I have not seen on myself in I do not know how long. I went back twenty minutes later to check I had not talked myself into it. By about six weeks the wrinkles and lines around my mouth were looking visibly softer to me. My forehead. The lines around my eyes. The little ones on my lips. My nasolabial folds as well. Softer. Not gone, and I am not about to stand here claiming otherwise. But I stood in that hallway looking at the gap on the wall and thought, for the first time in eleven years, that I would not mind something new going up in it. Around twelve weeks was the big one, and it was the sagging. The sagging at my jowls looked visibly tighter to me. The sagging along my jaw read visibly firmer end to end. The sagging down my neck, which I had stopped photographing years ago, looked visibly tighter as well, and the whole lower half of my face read visibly lifted to me, which is a thing I had never once gotten out of a jar. Firmer and smoother to my eye, and that glow had stopped being an evening thing and just stayed. People have remarked on it too, and not one of them has mentioned age. What they keep saying instead is that I look less tired. That is my face, and my opinion of my face. What it would do for anybody else I could not tell you. The photograph is back on the wall. I put the hook back myself. But I had a copy made, a good one, and I gave it to Rachel in an envelope, and I told her she could keep it on her mirror as long as she stopped using it as a countdown. And if you are somewhere in your fifties, sixties or seventies, and there is a daughter or a niece who has lately begun standing a little closer to her own mirror than she used to: This is the whole reason I bothered writing any of it down. Whatever she buys next will explain to her that her last purchase was simply the wrong choice. That is the only argument this industry has ever needed, and it will still be running when she turns fifty-eight. But your marionette lines, the sagging at your jowls, your nasolabial folds, your mouth wrinkles and the sagging down your neck are all happening underneath the surface, and nearly everything either of us has ever been sold was built to sit on top of it. It took me twenty-five years and a photograph off my own wall to find that out. She gets to find it out at thirty-four. 👉 https://go.dermareviewsonline.com/229b9a2b-b4bc-45a8-a69f-8303f2dd0663