Going Skin Deep without a Tongue Bath

Spynx are hairless and creep me out.

Microdermabrasion. It's a long word.  Actually, it maybe a couple words that I just say together really fast as if they were one.  I'm not really sure.

It means superficial damage to the skin, and, when done on purpose,  Kelly Whitworth tells me with a straight face that it feels like a cat is licking you.

I actually own a cat, Maggie.  I don't let her lick me.  It's nothing personal, I don't let the dog lick me either.

I didn't intend to own a cat, not yet anyway.
Eventually.   I plan on being the scary old lady with white scraggly hair that lives at the end of the street and has wild cats running everywhere.
The one that everyone whispers is a witch.  But, that isn't until AFTER my run for the US Senate as a Tea Party Candidate.

The girls asked me for a cat for Christmas last year.  They wanted one that didn't have any hair, a breed they call the Spynx.  It is a relatively new breed that comes from Canada where a stray female produced hairless kittens.

There actually is a decent Spynx cattery in Alaska named Woolies, which claims on their website that these in-your-face pets are perfect for everyone.   I know.  And later, after the disclaimer that the Sphynx is NOT hypo-allergenic, they also tell you that the Sphynx requires frequent bathing which removes the dirt, oil and dander that cause allergies.

I could not visualize myself giving a shivering hairless cat a bath once, and there is no way that it was going to happen frequently.  The wrinkly folds of their skin made me feel 20 years older just looking at the picture.  I tubed the idea immediately.

The girls did some more research and determined that male black cats are least likely to be adopted from a shelter, also known as more likely to be killed, so I agreed to a mature, housebroken, neutered, black adult male cat.

Craigslist pointed us to a local cat adoption operation known as Clear Creek Cat Rescue which picks up all the strays from Sarah Palin's pound and finds them new homes.  They charge $60 and offer a 10 day return for any reason with a full refund.  Didn't think you could get more reasonable than that.

Boris-Poe-Maggie, a black Angora

Of course, as luck would have it, they had a rare breed kitten that was solid black and was dumped because the breeder couldn't sell him.  They named the Angora "Boris," and put him in with a half dozen other fosters in a trailer, where he spent most of his time hiding.  He came home with us.

Boris wasn't mature, adult, or neutered, but he was housebroken.  His name change to Poe, after Edgar Allen.  He liked to eat the power cord to my computer, and knocked down a lamp when he got zapped, which crashed into the screen of my laptop causing the immediate unresurrectable death of my iMac.  The one I perform all my work product on.  The cat and I hit it off really well early on.

Oh, Poe could NOT be neutered, I discovered when I took him to the vet, because he is a girl - which is why he is now named Maggie, after the cougar in the Rod Stewart song.

Back to microdermabrasion.  I went over to Kelly's office, Exquisite Skin Esthetics which is part of the Alyeska Center for Facial Plastic Surgery to get the dead skin vacuumed off my face.  Well, that is what it is, really.  Your face is no different than any other surface, and there are two ways that professionals use to get stuff that is stuck on off - they either sandblast or use a bagged sander.  Sandblasting is when they use crystals, while a diamond head works more like a sander.

Broken capillaries ruined my porcelain doll complexion.

Microdermabrasion isn't going to work as well for me as it does for other skin types, because I have skin that is easily broken - hence the red spider web of broken capillaries that have cropped up from extreme cold and sun exposure when I was climbing McKinley without oxygen back in the early 70s... or walking to Homestead Elementary School in winter, whatever.  Kelly suggests a light microdermabrasion will lift off all the lint and leave a clean surface for the next procedure, the IPL Photofacial.

After having experienced the microdermabrasion, I can say that there is more grief involved in figuring out how to say it and how to spell it than the procedure itself actually brings.  Kelly showed Bella all the dead skin she lifted off my spanking-clean-to-start-with skin, it was a tidy pile I chose not to look at.  Skin lint.  Ewh.

In Make Up an hour later.  No worries.

There was a little bit of redness that went away after an hour or so, nothing really to get excited about, and it was easily covered with make up for the Pamyua music video appearance I had scheduled right after that.

Microdermabrasion didn't feel like a cat licking my face, it wasn't wet and scratchy at all.  Instead it felt like the time I got bored and decided to put the vacuum cleaner hose over my eye and came up with a hickey...only with less suction.

No, there are no photos of that, but I told everyone that my then-boyfriend, Bryan Schutt, accidentally caught me with his elbow, and he was kind enough not to correct me in public.

Microdermabrasion isn't painfully expensive,  $120 a session as a stand alone or $75 when combined with another treatment.  It buffs away the surface skin cells while improving circulation and product absorption.   Kinda like sanding the wood's surface before you paint.  I figured if I was going all out with the IPL Photofacial it only made sense to do what I could to obtain the best possible result, I know a little prep work in refinishing wood can make all the difference in the success of the finished product.

Come join me on my appointment with Kelly and Bella, and see how things went first hand.  Watch the three 5 minute videos now by clicking here.

Things about Dorene you Never Knew, and Never Wanted To

I don't wash my face.  I know that sounds odd, but it is true.  Not to say that I walk around with a dirty face.  I stick it under the nozzle in the shower and give it a good blast, and rub make up remover around on a cotton ball until the color stops coming off before I go to bed...but in the American sense, I don't wash my face.

I don't take a hot washcloth and fill it up with soap and scrub my face like the kitchen floor.  I don't draw the sink full of water and stick my head in like I am dunking for apples.  I just don't do these things.  Having the skin on my face feel crispy clean is not a pleasant sensation for me.  

So when my now personal skin whisperer Kelly Whitworth tells me that I have to wash my face TWICE a day, I am just a bit skeptical that I am going to be able to pull this off.  Dorene Translation:  Face Washing = drying cracking skin and water all over the floor.  Now that's something to look forward to.

PCA skin Creamy Cleanser comes in a slick skinny plastic bottle with a smart black cap and smells like the Nikiski soap they sell at Flypaper that comes wrapped in wool.  Just slash some warm water on your face, rub a tiny bit of cleanser between your hands, and rub-a-dub-dub.  Then splash more water around rinsing off the cleanser.

Not a fan of the mess, but afterwards my skin feels...clean.  Not squeaky clean, just clean.  Clean is important, because all the rest of the lotions and potions that Kelly has crammed into my bag get absorbed into the skin, and if there is something between them in and skin we start to have issues.

"The epidermis layer of the skin contains an acid mantle layer which limits the amount of substances entering though the skin that affect the body to a minor degree," says the PCA website.  Yes, it is true, I actually looked this up before I applied something specifically designed to remove my protective acid mantle layer shield.

I don't know much about the science of skin, don't really want to know much about the science of skin.  I bet Kelly can spell epidermis without looking it up on dictionary.com so I am taking her word for it on the stripping off the acids theory.

The bottle tells me that it is filled with a nourishing blend of rose hip seed oil, aloe and amino acids  and that it infuses skin with antioxidant and cell-regenerating benefits for radiant, younger-looking skin.  Key Ingredients: Rose Hip Seed Oil, Yucca Schidigera Extract, Sunflower Seed Oil  and Aloe Barbadensis Leaf Juice.  Those all sound fairly familiar and not quite so scary.

Lets move down to the fine print.  Ingredients: Water - actually surprised it is the first ingredient because this stuff is thick.  Glycerin - that makes it a soap, cough, cleanser.  Caprylic - no idea, Behenyl Alcohol - a cocktail I don't drink.

Sodium Methyl Cocoyl Taurate - I'm going out on a limb and suggest this might have something to do with coconuts and the ability to suds up but it has been two decades since I was the spokesmodel for Alaska Shampoo and I don't remember much from that lifetime.

Hydroxpropyl Methylcellulose - Sure, right on that one.  Phenoxethanol - clueless.  Hamamelis Vinginiana (Witch Hazel) Water - Witch Hazel, good for dying up zits!  Score one for Dorene for figuring that one out!

Sodium Cocoyl Glutamate - hmm, salt coconut molecules?  Rose Canina Fruit Oil - Rose hips.  Sucrose Sterate- Sugar that can't reproduce?  Yucca Shidigera Leaf/Root/Stem Extract - One of those pointy desert plants.  Hellanthus Annuus (sunflower) Seed Oil - Big yellow flowers with crunchy centers, Aloe Barbadensis Leaf Juice Powder - Why would you powder juice instead of adding less water?  Not getting that.

Xanthan Gum - Not quite like Trident, just guessing.  Lacandula Hybrida Oil - sounds like something used for happy ending massages in a bad porn movie, and Potassium Sorbate - which sounds like a Japanese ice cream flavor to me.

End of the blog, it works and is no more messy than liquid soap and significantly less messy than the hard bar of Dial I used to have to clean up after when I was married, so I'm down with it.

Susie Chapstick

I am not a lotions and potions kind of girl, but I have this uneasy feeling that today marks the day that I officially moved into that category.

It started out simple enough - shower, which means shampoo and condition my hair and shave.  Floss and brush my teeth.  Pull hair into ponytail.  Apply mascara and lipgloss.  Meet Bella and Kelly at Cafe del Mundo.

Not a lot of steps to my daily routine.  Seward has an ideal humidity for my skin type, so my beauty regime mostly consisted of what I didn't do.  Didn't smoke.  Didn't drink.  Didn't stay out all hours of the night.  Didn't get up at the butt crack of dawn.

My cousin Kim, who has flawless skin, would always gently insist that I do something.  She would kindly offer me a bottle of nectar to stave away the wrinkles, and later complain about the quality of my complexion.

That was then, this is now.  Anchorage is a desert, and the dry air makes my skin hurt.  In the world of HD, every fine line is magnified and captured for posterity.  Bella complains about the amount of time she spends Photoshopping my pictures so I don't look like a grannie.

Both she and Kelly looked flat mortified when I shared that I often use Vaseline and Chapstick to moisturize my skin in the winter, and Bag Balm in the summer.   Oil of Olay got way to complicated for me when they rolled out the different tiers of product, but I'm telling you right now it did right by my Grandma Mom.

When I accepted Kelly's kind offer to set up a program to take better care of my skin, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.  Now Kelly Whitworth is a trained professional, a medical esthetician, she does this skin stuff for a living so I will quickly grant she knows what more about skin than I ever care to.   She rolls out all these latin words like I roll out sugar cookies.  I think she even knows how to spell them.

I was honestly thinking Kelly would suggest some miracle creamy thing you slapped on when it got cold so your cheeks and nose wouldn't get more frostbit, and something else around the eyes to smooth out the wrinkles that was featured in a Popular Science issue that I missed.

No such luck.  The large bag was filled with boxes and bottles.  Filled.  It came with written instructions that laid out how a counter full of products would be applied in which order twice a day.  Twice a day.

Against my better judgment, confident this was going to be a waste of time, I spent a ridiculous amount of time removing all the packaging.  Literally filled up my bathroom garbage can with cardboard and plastic.

And then I went through the list.  One pump here, apply to face, floss your teeth.  Another pump there of a different product, apply to face, brush your teeth.  Yet another pump of yet another product, smear it around, brush out your hair while it is soaking in.  You get the idea.  Ridiculous.

Except.  Well, okay.   I hate to admit this, but after following the 500 steps of skin care Kelly lined out, my skin feels softer that I can ever remember it feeling.  It doesn't feel itchy, flaky and tight at all, and I only did it one time.  I know, so much for my give-it-the-old-college-try-then-blow-it-off theory - the stuff actually works!

There is no way I am going to be able to go through all the products and understand what they are in one sitting, or several.  Kelly spent the better part of two and a half hours walking me through them this afternoon.  I replaced all that data with the movie Karma Calling, which I watched tonight with the rest of the Anchorage International Film Festival Features Jury.  Hey, I'm a natural blonde, and the short term memory is full, when new data comes in something has to go out.

I'll try knocking the products off as I figure them out and distinguish the serums from the creams and the toners for you.  Thus far, all I can say is that everything seems to smell good, and a little bit goes a long way.