slather them all over your face.
Are you familiar with the Princess Bride? Not the excellent movie, but the excellent book. When Buttercup is introduced as a character, she is a young girl and is apparently only the 20th most beautiful woman in the world. The story goes on to talk about how the ones ahead of her lose their looks, and the one that I remember tells about a lovely woman who noticed a tiny wrinkle on her face. She worries about it and of course that brings on more wrinkles, and within a matter of days her perfect face looks like one of those dried-apple witches. Or something like that.
Well, I am well on my way to becoming a fruit snack. I’ve already written about using olive oil as lotion, and I’m fairly sure that I’ve told you about erasing my face every morning in the shower with baking soda, but while scrolling through Facebook one day, I stupidly clicked on Jennifer Aniston’s Secret To Youthful Skin. The giant ad told me that topical Vitamin C is where it’s at, and if I wanted to have amazing movie-star skin, this was the secret.
I actually thought about it. I stopped at a drugstore in Lincoln and looked at the shockingly expensive creams, lotions and potions. I was leery about shelling out 25 bucks for something I was quickly going to lose interest in.
So I went to my old friends the earth huggers. Apparently you can just use lemon juice straight as a mask. The acid is supposed to do a sort-of exfoliation (and you can’t go in the sun for half an hour since it’s photo-sensitive), and some of the vitamin C might go into your skin that way. It has the added bonus of danger since some people react badly to the acid. You can also mix it with honey and lick your face clean afterward, or dip your face in a cup of hot tea. (After it’s been on 5 – 14 minutes, wash it off. Then I put olive oil on.) Whatever you do, just don’t check to see that the wrinkles are going away.
Because they aren’t. They never, ever will.