I grew up with a racially ambiguous father, a white mother, and two half-Mexican brothers from my mother’s previous marriage. When I asked my mother about my skin tone, she said I had an allergy to citrus that made me darker. As a result, I wasn’t allowed to enjoy lemonade on hot summer days. She also said that I’d been sick when I was born, and the doctor had given me a shot that accidentally hit my “color gland.”
One day my fourth-grade teacher took a survey of the races in her classroom. When she said, “White,” I raised my hand, and the Black children almost ate me alive. My teacher stepped in to defend my claim. I don’t know if she felt sorry for me or if my mother had fed her one of the same stories she’d given me.
When I was nine, I told my neighbor the color-gland story. Eleven years old and precocious, she announced there was no such thing and my mother was lying to me. For some strange reason I felt hope in that moment: Maybe my skin tone was evidence that my parents weren’t my real parents, and there was a happy family out there who looked like me and would be delighted to meet and love me.
I stopped telling that story, along with the citrus one. My father, who turned a caramel color when he spent time working outside, had once told me his family had Cherokee in their blood, so that became my story. The laughter stopped, but my mother started buying me bleaching creams and instructed me to stay in the shade before five o’clock. I spent summers in long sleeves or playing with my white dolls on the porch and feeling ashamed.
In high school I joined the track team, which meant I had to run outside in a tank top and shorts. When I returned from a meet, my mother said I was so black my eyes shined. Another time she told me I was “as black as the ace of spades.”
Shortly after my father passed away, my brothers began nonchalantly calling me the N-word. “Smile so I can see you,” one of them would say. He’d also burst out singing, “Pick a bale of cotton, pick a bale of hay.” I’d laugh along, but my sense of self corroded.
When I was in my early forties, my mother became ill and came to live with my children and me. She needed surgery and was at risk of not surviving it. I told her that, in case she died, I needed to know: Was my father really my father? Was I Black?
She said I’d made myself Black.
I knew then I’d never get the truth from her.
Three years after she passed away, I took a DNA test. The results arrived a couple of days after my fiftieth birthday. The man I’d been raised to believe was my father was not. Instead I matched a family with a last name I’d heard my mother mention years ago. It belonged to an African American reverend she’d visited for spiritual counseling. I wondered what kind of crazy story she must have told the man who’d raised me to convince him I was his. If he knew the truth, he never treated me as if he did.
After I learned my history, I looked in the mirror for what felt like the first time and saw soft curls and golden-caramel skin that weren’t the product of some freak of nature but the result of an affair my mother had with a man who’d passed away forty-two years ago. It was the start of learning to hold my head up with pride.
Cherye Altice
Houston, Texas
Owing to debilitating shyness and a case of acne that seemed to break out on the eve of any social event, I mostly steered clear of girls in high school, but when Mike Michau reported that Debbie Glick would be at a party on Saturday night, I couldn’t stay away. Debbie was a vision.
Preparing for the big night, I put on a pale yellow shirt and applied an extra layer of Clearasil. The party commenced with girls chatting on one side of the basement and the boys milling around on the opposite end. Bob Remiasz was the first to cross the divide, after which the rest of us migrated en masse, and I found myself face-to-face with the angel herself, in an ivory sweater with a crucifix on a thin gold chain around her lovely neck.
When I asked Debbie to dance, she hesitated, surveyed the room, then smiled and said yes.
My hands were sweaty, but she didn’t seem to notice as we danced to Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet.” I held her close enough to smell strawberry in her hair, but not close enough that she could feel my heart pumping.
After the music stopped, I thanked her and retreated to savor my good fortune. I didn’t fully realize how kind she was until I went to the bathroom. In the mirror I saw my double layer of Clearasil had become caked, cracked, and orange, like a Halloween mask for Teenage Frankenstein.
David McGrath
Port Charlotte, Florida
When I was little, I hated that I didn’t look like the other girls, and I dreamed that one day I’d wake up with fair skin and straight hair like theirs. I let my mom slather Fair & Lovely cream on me every morning before school, and I deleted all the summertime photos where my skin was too dark.
Now, as a senior in high school, I don’t hate my skin color anymore. It makes me think of my family. When we crowd together for a photo, we all have the same brown skin and curly hair. My complexion is the shade of the leaves that give a satisfying crunch under my shoes as I walk down the street in autumn. It’s the color of the chai Mom makes me when I get home from school.
Aarushi Kumar
Kinnelon, New Jersey
Near the end of eighth grade my class was given an assignment: We each had to write a speech commemorating the time we’d spent at Honey Creek Middle School. A sentimental child who gravitated toward writing, I was proud of mine and rehearsed it until it felt etched into my brain.
When the time came, I stepped to the front of the classroom and, lit by disappointingly uncinematic fluorescent lights, delivered the first few sentences perfectly—perfectly. Then a blank appeared in the string of words I’d memorized, and my heart sank. My peers averted their gaze as I imploded before them.
I sat down without finishing. When the bell finally rang, my friends rushed to console me—and also to ask what the heck had happened to my neck.
My neck?
They described how, as I’d stopped talking, blotchy red patches had appeared at my collarbones and crept up like a snake, darkening as they went.
After that, I came to expect this phenomenon. Each time I stood before my classmates in speech class, the snake coiled around my neck. My friends found it delightful. My teachers found it endearing. My doctor called it “anxiety-induced hives” from an increased release of histamine in my blood. I learned to wear turtlenecks whenever I had to speak in front of people.
In my mid-twenties I realized the snake also visited when I experienced a romantic infatuation, creeping up during a conversation with my first crush after the collapse of a long-term relationship. I prayed he hadn’t noticed but knew he probably had. This made me wonder how many of my middle school crushes had known exactly how I’d felt about them, the snake more definitive than any “Check yes or no” note slipped into one of those Honey Creek lockers.
H.G.
Indianapolis, Indiana
When I was in my twenties, my mother and I took the bus from Staten Island to get facials at the Christine Valmy beauty salon in the GM Building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Valmy’s was the height of luxury. Calming music was piped through the sound system, each client was given their own treatment room, and the facials were finished with a relaxing massage. My aesthetician, Blanche—who, like Christine Valmy, had fled Communist Romania—told me a rumor that, when Valmy had first arrived in the States, she’d seduced another giant of cosmetics, Erno Laszlo, and stolen the formulas for his successful creams.
One summer I enrolled in a course at the Christine Valmy International School for Esthetics, where I learned how to recognize and treat skin conditions. I learned which products would work on dry skin, which on irritated skin, and so on. I learned how to tell whether a client needed a deep massage that would break up toxins beneath the surface, or a gentle one that avoided doing that.
After a few weeks my classmates and I, working as a group, were allowed to treat clients under supervision. One was a petite, soft-spoken woman with a dry complexion and rosacea, which causes red blotches on the nose and cheeks. In extreme cases like hers, dilated capillaries produce bumps. We knew too much stimulation would only cause more redness, so we applied masks with chamomile and cucumber, washed her face with cool water, and removed oils with soft cotton pads, careful to use a light touch.
We held our breath as we turned her chair toward the mirror. When the woman saw her face, she cried. Her rosacea had disappeared. Her skin was smooth. It was so easy when you knew the right products and techniques.
I had taken the class to learn what powerful secrets this glamorous salon held. What I found was a place where you could make someone feel so much better about herself she would cry.
Ann Marie Antenucci
Staten Island, New York
“Freckle face” was a taunt I heard from as early as I can remember, often in tandem with “Red, Red, wet the bed, wiped it up with gingerbread.” My skin was white—fish-belly, Irish-lace white. By the time I reached grade school, my arms had been sunburned so badly, the freckles were gone in places. I felt unlovable and envied those with blemish-free skin.
Later, as a young man working construction in a mountain town, I decided to go shirtless all day like my coworkers and got blisters on top of burns on top of peels. When I exposed myself to my first lover, I did so with shame and trepidation, certain she’d be repulsed. Miraculously she traced circles on my skin and kissed my hated hands while tears of relief and wonder pooled in my eyes.
Now my skin is scarred from skin-cancer removals and wrinkled and splotchy from age, but I own it. In photographs I stand next to my fair-skinned, red-haired daughter who, thanks to my slathering her with sunscreen throughout her childhood, has never had a burn.
Bob Regan
Nashville, Tennessee
When I asked my mother which box to check for race on my college applications, she said, “White.” I was puzzled. My father was as pale and European as they come, but my grandparents on her side were Lebanese and Syrian, and she prided herself on her Mediterranean skin tone. It seemed odd she wanted me to negate half my heritage.
When I questioned her, she replied, “I don’t want anyone treating you as less than everyone else.”
I did what I was told, but part of me wanted to know more about my Middle Eastern ancestry. When I got to college, I bought a book about the Egyptian gods. Once, a professor couldn’t figure out my ethnicity because I possessed both freckles and almond-shaped eyes.
Only later did I learn that my mother and her brothers were called “towel heads” and “camel jockeys” growing up in Bangor, Maine. She viewed assimilation as the only way to survive. More recently, when diversity became not just accepted but celebrated, my mother embraced her heritage but still occasionally told people she was from “Brazil, where the nuts come from,” just to be funny.
Now, when I check “Middle Eastern,” I celebrate the identity my mother once wanted me to hide.
Cynthia Adam Prochaska
Pasadena, California
As one of only a few Chinese kids in my elementary school, I often wanted to disappear. In my teens, however, my pale friends told me I was lucky to have a natural tan. Still, I spent summer afternoons lathering myself with baby oil and baking in the Philly sun for hours beside them, trying to achieve the perfect Saint-Tropez bronze we saw on TV.
This bewildered my grandma, who’d grown up in China and used an umbrella when she stepped into the sun—that is, until I shamed her into stopping. “People will think you’re a nut,” I warned. Umbrellas were for rain only. When I told her people even lie in coffin-like tanning beds to brown their bodies, she was aghast. In China, a tan meant one was a laborer, sweating in the heat, and not a white-collar worker in an air-conditioned office.
It took a while, but now, in my fifties, I’m content in my skin and grateful my youthful stupidity didn’t result in permanent damage. I especially appreciate how my complexion hides my wrinkles.
Judy Chow
Medford, New Jersey
My weight has been the bane of my existence for the past fifty years. I think about it several times a day, whether lamenting the extra fifty to a hundred pounds I carry, or occasionally rejoicing when I step on the scale and see I’m down a pound or two.
At my daughter’s wedding a couple of years ago I found myself in a changing room with a friend of hers. We’d just finished setting up the venue and now had five minutes to change into our wedding attire. As this woman stripped down to her underwear and slipped into a beautiful sundress, she didn’t even glance in the mirror. Dumbstruck, I told her how beautiful she looked in that dress. “You have a stunning figure. It’s perfect, really.”
She looked surprised. “Oh . . . thank you?” She paused. “I don’t know what to say when people compliment my appearance. I don’t work out. I don’t watch what I eat. It’s all genetics, so I don’t deserve the credit.”
One of my oldest friends recently confessed that she envied my “perfect” skin. I was taken aback. Not only had she never talked about my skin, but I had never given it much thought myself. She was annoyed: “Oh, c’mon. I’ve been with you when strangers have asked about your skin-care regimen. There’s no way you can’t know what a beautiful complexion you have.”
No, I hadn’t known. I don’t have a skin-care regimen, for the simple reason that I rarely look at my face. I’m too focused on what I see from my neck down.
Cathy Brenman
San Mateo, California
I always knew I was Italian and something else, but that something else was ever shifting. Sometimes we were Spanish. Other times I heard Mexican. Most often Mom just stuck with “You’re American!” I don’t think she was trying to erase her brownness, just the father she inherited it from—an abusive man who, if my parents spoke of him at all, was referred to as Crazy Joe. It took decades for me to understand how his avoidance of the sun and refusal to speak the Spanish of his boyhood were evidence of self-hatred.
I first felt the sting of shame for being different when Mom enrolled me in Girl Scouts. I’d gone to preschool with children of all colors in California, but Colorado Springs in the early nineties was populated largely by people of German descent. I had a thick mass of curly hair and skin the same yellow-tan as my scouting sash.
Or maybe it wasn’t my hair and complexion that made the other girls wrinkle their noses. Maybe it was that I didn’t know the pledge and didn’t have money for dues and appropriate clothes. The others all had outfits purchased from the Girl Scout catalog (which Mom had recycled after glancing at a single price) and sashes heavy with badges, patches, and pins—proof they’d been Scouts for years. I wore silver Moon Boots, pink leggings, and an oversized Minnie Mouse sweatshirt handed down from my sister.
After our meeting, while we ate Jell-O and waited for our parents to pick us up, a girl with silky blond hair and Baby Spice pigtails asked, “What are you?”
“Eight and three-quarters,” I shared.
Everyone laughed. “No, where do you come from?” she asked, smiling with teeth and gums, her “Top Cookie Seller” patch gleaming with gold thread.
“California.”
They all laughed again. “I bet she’s Mexican,” the pigtailed girl said, as if it were a bad word.
To me that word brought to mind things I enjoyed: Mexican food, Speedy Gonzales, and the hand-braided earrings my aunt had brought me from her trip to Cabo. I asked the girl why she thought that.
“Because you look dirty,” she said just before her mom appeared to retrieve her. I knew I shouldn’t cry, so I laughed like I was in on the joke. When Mom showed up, she seemed exasperated to be shaken down by the troop leader for my dues, but she smiled when she saw me with the other Scouts. She thought I was making friends.
Sammi LaBue
Brooklyn, New York
Red-boned, high-yellow, light-skinned mulatto—these were the words I heard from the mouths of teenagers and catcalling grown men who should have known better than to harass a young girl. Words used to mock me.
In junior high both light- and dark-skinned girls admired my complexion, but a few dark-brown girls called me “uppity” because I was light-skinned and had “good hair.”
I first recognized the privilege my complexion granted when I got invited to parties sponsored by social clubs with wealthy Black members. I thought I’d stumbled upon a new group of friends, but when the clubs extended membership invitations, I feared being unmasked as a fraud. My light skin had been enough currency to get me invited, but financially I was nowhere near these daughters of elite Black families.
No matter how beige my complexion, I still experienced profiling in department stores, where employees tracked my movements through the aisles. White folks hardly acknowledged me on the street and expected me to step aside to allow them to pass. Makeup palettes disregarded the shades of Black women, and I couldn’t find pantyhose to match my legs.
Through DNA testing I’ve unearthed a lineage that shows the path my ancestors traveled: the triangle of the transatlantic slave trade. My heritage comprises not only African slaves, but also white slave traders and owners who raped Black women. There’s much to deplore in my white ancestors’ actions, but I’m proud to also descend from African people who endured in the face of so much adversity. My ancestry illuminates a national tragedy that’s been whitewashed for too long.
Michelle Smith
San Diego, California
As soon as I got home from the dermatologist, I ran to my magnifying mirror to investigate the birthmark on my cheek. The doctor had said it could be removed if I wanted. Did it look like an age spot? A few had appeared on my hands, and the brown oval did look similar. But I’d had it all fifty-eight years of my life. How would my face look without it?
In elementary school I pretended not to hear the other students say, “Is that a poop stain on your face?” Later I snuck into my mother’s makeup drawer in search of foundation to conceal it. In junior high the joke became “Is that a shit stain on your face?” One boy in particular seemed obsessed with my birthmark. No matter how I tried to ignore him, the teasing continued, shaping my personality. I was tall, athletic, and a tomboy, so I morphed into a tough girl who swore and yelled if you bugged me. Some girls wanted to be my friend, but they also feared me. No one mentioned my birthmark ever again, though I still noticed it every time I looked in the mirror.
Once, at an out-of-town volleyball tournament, I found myself alone in an elevator with Roger. I’ll admit, it wasn’t by chance. He and I went to different schools but had noticed each other at previous tournaments, and I’d slipped into the elevator behind him. Roger was a few years older than me and tall, with curly hair, big eyes, and prominent eyebrows. His parents were Lebanese, I’d been told. All the girls thought he was a hunk.
As the elevator doors closed, we each pressed our floor number. I looked over and caught him staring at me and smiling. His eyes were even bigger up close.
“I love your birthmark,” he said.
This caught me off guard. “Oh, thanks,” I replied.
“Can I kiss it?” he asked.
I didn’t hesitate to say yes. His chiseled face approached my cheek in slow motion. After he kissed me, the doors opened, and he was gone.
After that, I felt like my birthmark made me unique. As I aged, it faded, and then, thanks to pregnancies and wacky hormones, it became more prominent, like a drop of dark chocolate. “Hey, your birthmark is back,” my husband said. “It’s been a while. I’ve missed it.”
I think of it as my beauty spot.
Ingrid Littmann-Tai
Calgary, Alberta
Canada
I was fifteen years old when a relative called the colossal pimple in the middle of my forehead my “third eye.” The shame I felt obliterated my ability to see this as harmless kidding.
Made shy by my painful cystic acne, I was a loner who struggled to make eye contact and buried my face in books. On top of this I was gay, at a time when homosexuality was considered a psychiatric disorder.
In my first year of college, while I was walking down the hallway to my dorm room, a fellow student passed and said, “Hi, cutie.” Once I realized she was talking to me, I returned her compliment. Soon after, she became my girlfriend.
I took medication that stopped the breakouts but left behind scars so severe my face resembled a topographic map. At least they were largely on the side of my face, not the front. And no one made vicious jokes anymore, so I largely forgot about my complexion.
Then one day I had to appear in a work-related video. When the camera panned to the side of my face, I gasped at the pockmarks, the disfigurement, and I remembered. Later, with tears in my eyes, I asked my wife, “Why didn’t you tell me I looked like this?”
Mary Ellen Mastrorilli
Plymouth, Massachusetts
Almost every day after school I’d sit in our backyard garden beside my grandfather’s prize rosebushes and wait for Desmond to call. With me were our portable home phone, a blanket, a cushion, and a copy of The Catcher in the Rye—a decoy so no one would know the real reason I was there.
Desmond was from Guyana. His was the first family of color to move to our Brooklyn block. Desmond and I become fast friends anyway after I got jumped in middle school by a group of older girls and he began walking me home to keep me safe. The arrangement was short-lived, though, once neighbors started talking and my grandfather, who lived with my family, saw Desmond and me together.
Now he called once a week, sometimes twice. I’d lie on my back and daydream about a first kiss that would never come. When I rolled onto my side, I could see through the rosebushes to the window he was calling from. He was the only boy who didn’t call me “Louie’s little sister” or make fun of me for being fat. He checked in on me and cared that I felt alone. Hours would pass while I talked to him, phone held between my shoulder and ear. I didn’t understand why it was OK for me to have girlfriends with different-colored skin, but the rules were different for Desmond and me.
Eventually he moved. We never said goodbye, but I still think about him to this day.
Name Withheld
I’m white, and when I married into a traditional Tamil family, some Indian American friends told me to bring my own makeup on my wedding day to avoid having to borrow some and looking orange. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem, according to my future sister-in-law, was my tan. I’d spent two months working outside, and she worried our mother-in-law wouldn’t approve. Later I found a whitening face wash she’d “accidentally” left in my bathroom, where I would find it.
The wedding went off without a hitch. I wasn’t orange, and, no, I didn’t use the face wash. The only question my mother-in-law asked was why I was wearing my hair in a bun instead of the traditional braid.
Annie D.
Tamil Nadu, India
My brother Gary got teased mercilessly by the neighborhood boys for his clumsiness on the basketball court and his uselessness in the outfield. When his face broke out in eighth grade, they’d twist the knife even further by referencing his “pizza face.”
I’d seethe inside, but the last thing Gary needed was his little brother coming to his defense. He’d blush and awkwardly smile, absorbing their barbs in silence until his tormentors moved on. It was painful to watch, but I sensed that, in the end, Gary got the better of them by not reacting.
Sometimes I got pissed at Gary and teased him myself. It was widely believed then that chocolate caused acne, so I’d wave a spoonful of my fudge-ripple ice cream in my brother’s face to make him jealous. He’d just laugh. He genuinely liked butter pecan better—which only pissed me off more.
Sometimes I’d walk past the bathroom and see Gary sitting on the countertop, the green plastic pHisoHex bottle next to him, while Mom delicately dabbed at the red clusters spread across his face. In our chaotic household of six, this ritual was a rare moment of quiet one-on-one time between mother and son. I wouldn’t have traded places with my brother, but whenever I saw him sitting there contentedly, on the receiving end of Mom’s tenderness, I felt a pang of jealousy.
Name Withheld
My sixteen-year-old daughter has an hour-long skin-care routine that rivals that of any serum-layering, gua-sha-massaging middle-aged woman. I don’t think she needs it. Aside from some adolescent acne, her skin is flawless.
But who am I to judge? When I was sixteen, my skin-care regimen consisted of buying the biggest bottle of baby oil, slathering myself like a Christmas ham, and baking under the sun from 10 AM to 2 PM. Now, at fifty-three, I worry if the sun hits my face while I’m driving and wonder if I should get UV window-tinting. I watch the same TikTok beauty videos as my daughter and can’t help but applaud the young people for taking care of their skin.
But no matter how much under-eye cream and vitamin C + niacinamide serum I use, or how diligently I do my double-cleansing every night, the damage is done. Cute freckles no longer dot the landscape of my face. These days the dark spots drift together to form sun-ravaged continents. Knowing I can’t reverse time, I strive for proper maintenance.
Natasha Chiam
Edmonton, Alberta
Canada
When my sister was young, a boy on a rival baseball team told her, “You’re nothing but a potato picker.” Based on her brown skin, he had assumed, correctly, that my sister came from a Mexican farmworker family.
That boy wouldn’t have called me a potato picker, because I inherited Papi’s light skin. Regardless of skin tone, though, everyone in our family harvested crops. We wore gloves and sombreros and long sleeves, and we worked with short-handle hoes, burlap sacks, and potato-picking belts.
Without farmworkers there would be no produce on grocery store shelves, yet Mexican laborers often get ridiculed. At a party hosted by a university where I worked in the 1990s, the after-dinner speaker joked that his idea of manual labor is some guy from Mexico. The academics and professionals around me burst into guffaws and applause while You’re nothing but a potato picker rang in my ears. Unable to muster a retort, I sat quietly sipping water while memories stirred inside me: Thinning sugar beets after school with Papi. Flats full of strawberries. Burlap sacks filled with onions and potatoes.
The other guests acted like they didn’t even see the brown-skinned waiters clearing dessert dishes. Glimpsing a waiter’s name tag, I smiled and said, “Gracias, Lorenzo, muy amable.” You’ve been very helpful.
“You too, Señora,” he replied.
Others at the table cast sheepish glances at me. With three Spanish words, I had come out from behind my white skin in a show of solidarity, not only with the waiters but with my sister, whose heritage is apparent in the glow of her brown face.
Teresa Elguézabal
Baltimore, Maryland
My father and I were both born in Southern California, but we often said we should’ve been born in Scotland. He was blond, green-eyed, and fair-skinned. I’m red-haired and freckled. That didn’t stop us from spending time in the sun, though.
Born before the widespread use of sunscreen, my father was an athlete who played tennis, boated, and played golf. In Avalon Harbor he’d swim by the SS Catalina steamship and dive for the coins passengers would throw off the side. He got sunburned from head to toe over and over again.
When I was a teenager, it was customary to rub one’s body in baby oil or cocoa butter, lie in the sun, and sizzle. My brother and I would return from ski trips with our faces blistered. During the summer we spent hours in a pool, where our backs reddened; later we’d peel strips of dead skin off each other’s backs.
By the time I was an adult, everyone in my family (except my mother, who had an olive complexion) could compare skin lesions and growths. My father was convinced he’d die from a melanoma, but, as it turned out, he died from colon cancer. At his funeral I listed the things I was grateful he’d passed on to me: his love of animals and the outdoors, his sense of humor, his argumentativeness. But not the complexion.
Peggy Mulder Kersulis
Redondo Beach, California
She looks at herself and sees myriad imperfections: swollen red zits, popped ones, whiteheads. At first the picking started with a few bumps on her arms. Then it spread to her legs and face. It doesn’t matter that advertisements use models with vitiligo. Her TikTok account tells her to buy not just toners and creams but face-shaving kits, gua-sha stones, and infrared light treatments—all available at the click of a button.
I see my beautiful teenage daughter as perfectly unique. I remember being her age and hating the two moles on my cheeks. Now I look at them with pride.
My daughter’s urge to pick has become an addiction, because it gives her a sense of control. She says school is fine, she doesn’t want to go to that party, she would rather listen to music alone in her room. She’s become an expert at carefully concealing her acne with makeup. I wonder what else she’s concealing.
G.K.
San Antonio, Texas
As a nineteen-year-old Middle Eastern girl I feel like I’m under a microscope. People often comment on my weight or the occasional pimples that show up like unwelcome guests. I can’t step outside without acquaintances telling me about homemade remedies on how to fix my complexion.
When I wake up to find new blemishes, I feel a weight settle on my chest and force myself to think about the days my skin clears up—those fleeting moments of confidence when I look in the mirror and smile. But with every pimple, my self-confidence wanes, and I spend too much on trendy skin-care products, hoping something will finally work.
One day I felt particularly low. I was at a family gathering when an elder relative noticed a blemish and remarked, “You should really try to take care of that.” I wanted to explain that I had tried everything, but I just nodded and looked away.
I continue to remind myself my worth isn’t tied to how clear my skin is. I think of laughing with friends, the warmth of family gatherings, the confidence I feel when I share my thoughts and passions. I’m learning to embrace my skin as part of my story.
Name Withheld
I know the story I tell others, how simple it feels, as if I’m trying to convince myself there’s nothing more to it: I was born with it. But looking at photos at home, I don’t see it. The small girl who poses in her ballet costume isn’t marked with what strangers will one day assume is a black eye. Those big brown almonds look into the camera and seem untouched by anything abnormal. Where’s the giant darkness that rings my eye—the birthmark that, for the better part of my life, has defined me?
My mother tells me it grew so slowly that she can’t pinpoint the exact before and after. “You always had the purple dots in your eyes, from the moment you were born, so it was probably around puberty,” she says. “As your face stretched, it did, too.”
I don’t remember how the blue-black purple dots spilled over the edge and onto the skin below, but I’d like to. I imagine it was soft and gentle, a whisper. The rest of my body grows big and strong; the bones of my face are easier to see—gentle slopes that poke out from my cheeks. And I’m taller. Jeans don’t fit right because my hips are shaping new curves. I wish I knew it was happening as it did. Maybe I would have seen it differently. Maybe I would watch the pigmentation bubble up from a well inside of me, and know it is beautiful.
Jessica L. Pavia
Rochester, New York
When I turned sixteen in 1965, I developed a raging case of acne—not your normal pimples but painful, cystic zits. My parents shared the prevailing attitude that acne was a part of adolescence and, despite my complaints, assured me I would outgrow it.
One morning I woke up with a large red cyst on the end of my nose. I couldn’t gaze straight ahead without my eyes crossing. Not even the pancake makeup I’d purchased with my allowance diminished its appearance. My parents were traveling outside the country, and my grandmother was staying with my younger brother and me. She was a perfectly capable custodian but not someone I could turn to for guidance.
So I rode my bicycle to our neighborhood grocery. The cashier kept looking at my face as she checked out my items. I finally couldn’t stand it and asked, “You’re looking at my nose, aren’t you?”
With genuine concern, she responded, “It’s not permanent, is it?”
Almost in tears, I answered, “I hope not.”
One evening about two weeks into my despair, a handsome, popular boy named Danny called to ask me out on a date.
I said I would love to, but I couldn’t: “Surely you’ve seen the cyst on my nose?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You need to get that thing lanced.”
“What is lanced?”
“Just go to Dr. Moore. He’ll open it, let it drain, and it will heal and be gone. I’ve done it a bunch of times.”
Key West, Florida, was so small back then that I knew exactly who Dr. Moore was and how to get to his office. The next day I pedaled there with no appointment, no money, and no way to know if he’d even see me, much less lance the cyst. But he took pity on me and did indeed lance it without parental approval or payment. He also gave me some sample medications, which I later learned were cutting-edge for that era.
The cyst healed quickly, and Danny and I went on several dates. No romance developed, but we became friends, and I’ll always be grateful for his matter-of-fact, no-shame attitude toward managing what was then the most painful and humiliating experience of my life.
Stacie Fox
Johnson City, Tennessee
As a kid I was often told I had beautiful olive skin. I didn’t know what this meant. I thought olives were black or green. But because aunts, friends’ mothers, and random people all pointed it out, I figured that’s what I was. I knew my skin marked me as different, and maybe also desirable, but in a way that made me want to peel it off. This feeling only amplified whenever a stranger would pet my arm.
In my mid-thirties I finally googled “olive skin,” discovering it might mean the goldish color of olive oil, or maybe the green undertones of an olive. (The more pigment you have, the more food comparisons you hear.)
After getting COVID a few years ago, I developed eczema and rosacea, and my skin grew flaky and red. I was given a steroid that ended up bleaching my skin, and when the red flaked off, it revealed splotches of white. Though I’ve attempted to control it with medication, my face often lies somewhere along a spectrum of yellow to red. I’ve tried various makeup brands, but nothing has matched.
This might simply be how it is from now on. The more I try to obscure my complexion, the more it seems to shift from red, to yellow, to white—but never olive. Not anymore.
Blair Lee
Southern Pines, North Carolina
I’m standing in front of my mirror in my dorm room, desperately trying to make the red puffiness around my eyes disappear behind foundation. I pat here, pinch there, brush powder over the trails tears left behind, but in a matter of seconds the floodgates open once more.
My vision blurs, and suddenly I’m no longer a college student trying to return to class a week after my dad died. Instead I’m four years old, sitting outside on our front step in my hiking boots. My dad is kneeling in front of me, wearing a National Park T-shirt (when isn’t he?) and a baseball cap. He’s applied a blob of Coppertone sunscreen to the back of his hand as if it were a palette and extended his pointer finger—his “paintbrush.” Then he asks which color sunscreen I’d like on my cheeks.
“Yellow,” I answer.
“Yellow it is!” He dips his paintbrush into the paint and smears it onto my cheeks in circular strokes. It feels cool and creamy, and I almost forget how much I hate the feeling of sunscreen. Instead I imagine my face with sun-yellow cheeks. When he asks about my nose, I answer purple and watch him twirl his paintbrush in the dab of sunblock, mixing it to get the correct shade.
We continue until I’m a sun-protected canvas of imaginary colors. Then he says I can pick the colors for him to use on himself, so I do—red and orange and a little blue.
My eyes refocus on my face in the dorm mirror. I breathe deep, taking solace in the memory of where this freckled face comes from.
Georgia Grace Edwards
Crested Butte, Colorado
