Skin Tags
We were watching a movie last night, The Family Stone, staring Diane Keaton and various other celebrities. Two of the actresses who were in the younger generation of the family were Sarah Jessica Parker and Rachel McAdams. During the camera close-ups, it became obvious that each had a similar mole on her right-side chin, which distinguished her face with what our society generally calls a beauty mark. It was funny seeing a well-known urban Sex and the City star, Parker, in close-up with such a pronounced bump on her chin. I might add that this was not a colorful beauty spot, like what Marilyn Monroe sported in Some Like It Hot. Monroe did have a natural beauty mark, but it was on her left cheek just above the smile line. But for some reason, probably as the Film Noir era prescribed for facial interest, she moved the spot down, presumably with something like an eyebrow pencil. In olden days, such an artificial mark was called a mouche, and could take on one of many shapes and was sometimes deployed to hide smallpox or syphilis scars, and sometimes just put on to garner facial interest. They might even have placed one on their décolletage to draw glances and attention to their boobs. What is it about mid-century aesthetics that would make that change so sexually appealing (face it, that movie was intended from the title onward to heat up our mid-century libidos)?
Today, the tragic suicidal figure of Marilyn Monroe has become a film icon, replete with differing versions of a pronounced beauty mark. On Sarah Jessica Parker (why three names, to make our lives harder in aging memory loss?), the chin mark is just a bump, not a colorful spot. But on Rachel McAdams it is a more traditional, colored mole. Looking in a mirror for any man or woman, and finding a colorful mole is probably anything but sexy. And to be truthful, the coloring must be the sexy part to others, because the Sarah Jessica Parker colorless blemish looks more troubling than come-hither.
As a kid I had a colorful mole adjacent to my right nostril. I could only take so many comments from my sisters declaring me a bad nose blower who left a booger on my face after sneezing, so I had it surgically removed at a pre-adolescent age. I still have a colorless mole just above my left mustache, which is no mouche, but just enough to make me careful while shaving. It shouldn’t and doesn’t bother me in the mirror, mostly because it is almost exactly like Robert Redford’s facial nodules, and who would think that is anything but pleasant to look at. I guess moles are in the eye of the beholder. Do you remember John Candy in Uncle Buck, trying so hard and failing to avoid bringing attention to his nieces’ teacher’s facial melanoma? Classically funny.
But move down from the face and all it’s screen shot close-ups to the neck, a body part much less focused on except perhaps in vampire movies. The neck is a funny creature that ranges from being the symbol of womanhood in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, to something likened to barnyard foul ugliness. While some actresses might highlight their swanlike peduncle nature, mostly they are covered up with scarves or turtlenecks. But speaking of peduncles (the fleshy stalk of a bodily growth), what’s up with skin tags? They most often appear where flesh rubs on something (clothing or other flesh) and for some strange reason gives rise to a small floppy protrusion who’s sole purpose in life is to annoy you when you run your hand across it while dressing. You can get these things anywhere on your body, I suppose, but the most common place is on the neck, where you feel them whenever you are putting on a fresh clean shirt.
In times past, when I was more conscious of my bodily flaws, I would ask a dermatologist to “clean up my neck” and rid of the little annoyances. That would happen quickly and painlessly with a cryoknife or just a simple scalpel, leaving a small scab to disappear in a week. Removing bits and pieces of your body is not necessarily a problematic thing, but you do occasionally want to go all Dr. Hannibal Lecter and save the little beasts in a jar of formaldehyde. I’ve never done that, but I am nonetheless intrigued by these little fleshy protrusions. I always feel like I have several on my neck, so when I saw a clickbait ad for a removal liquid, I ordered it. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s not acid or something noticeably caustic. In fact, since it didn’t work on my neck (I can only find one tag at the T-shirt neckline), in a few days, I just stopped using it. So, now I have an unwanted bottle of Captis Extract and a skin tag. Who am I kidding, you know I have two bottles with eyedroppers of the junk since the second could be had only for the cost of handling and shipping, right? You never know when you might need more to amputate a leg or something.
Once I stopped using this extract on my neck twice a day, I just chose to embrace my skin tag. The trick is to not play with it when you do happen upon it. It’s pretty tempting and I won’t deny wondering what would happen if I just tried to tug it off like pulling off a bandaid. Since I don’t really want to bleed out from the neck, I have kept myself from being a do-it-yourself surgeon. Wise choice based on my experience with self toe surgery on callouses. One recent go at that caused me to take a chunk out of my bottom big toe and bleed all over the bathroom floor. I really need to stop doing that as it seems to bother Kim even more than it bothers me.
I think that is about all I can say about skin tags, except to say that they say more about a person than any serious impact they have on the body. I can’t imagine a little skin tag is too much of a drag on the body’s energy or resources. They don’t really get in the way of too much though I suppose given their likely location, they can get momentarily caught on clothing and cause a minor pinch. What they really represent is how we feel about ourselves. People have been making lemons into lemonade when it comes to facial imperfections like moles. They have created a mystique like beauty marks that have turned the undesirable into the desirable, with the caveat that just like with real estate, its all about location, location, location. And then there is the distraction affect. Have you ever seen an older woman who has a wiry hair coming out of her chin. You almost can’t look at that woman for very long without focusing entirely on her chin and her wayward hair. That can happen with an errant skin tag to be sure.
At our age, we are forever seeing older people on TV and commenting about how good or bad they look compared to their younger visage. This just happened yesterday with Jane Fonda, who is out advocating for climate reform. At age 85 her face looked amazing, to which Kim said that she had had lots of work done and probably uses Botox and fillers left and right. We discussed it and agreed that everyone is entitled to attend to their personal looks in whatever way they need to keep feeling good about themselves. I’m glad it is easier for both of us to do so without Botox et al, and I hope those who go the cosmetic surgery route, do so judiciously so that they don’t create a chin hair of themselves from which we cannot look away. In the mean time, I’m hanging on to whatever skin tags I have since I have no interest in going to the dermatologist and risking another “total skin review” like I had about 25 years ago, much to my own chagrin about how many bodily nooks and crannies that entails.