Glass is not alive. The eyes are invisible. It’s nothing, really. It seems to be seen. It has no beauty of its own. It distorts the light and bends the truth.

I don’t want to look like a mug.

And yet! There are 348 emails in my inbox telling me what to do. There is More than 402,000 million followers on Instagram suggests the same. There are over a billion Google search results for “glass skin,” magazines and blogs and product pages, all offering advice on how to make skin look less like skin and more. amorphous solid.

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OK, fine, these headlines are made up – but the power behind them is not. The pursuit of glass skin is actually ridiculous and unrealistic. To accept glasses as a cosmetic goal is to neglect (and worse, injure) the function of the skin.

There’s a reason skin isn’t like glass.

Beauticians have been praising mirror skin for quite some time. since 2017 minimum—perfect length and natural K-beauty is no longer a beauty trend but a beauty standard. Such as all beauty standards, glass skin is a physical impossibility, and as such, products that need to be purchased are used for Windexed perfection. (How convenient for capitalism!) It is endless. It is addictive. He enters the brain. It inspires the exact kind of passion that comes from wanting the unattainable.

I indulged in this desire for a while. I bemoaned the fact that my sensitive skin was not going to be like glass. Or a glazed donut, or a seal, or steamed dough, or Saran Wrap or peeled eggs. Insert shiny leather phrase here.

Then I realized: It is a very well things that the skin can’t achieve IRL (in fact, you have when saw a skin glass outside social media?), because all the features I will need to delete to get to use smooth, shiny glasses that are naturally there to protect me.

Like pores! Pores are drainage channels for sebum and sweat, skin brightener-slash-moisturizer and body temperature-regulator-slash-detoxifier, respectively. You can’t damage your pores and you don’t want to. With no pores, or with small pores, you will get hot and/or break out.

And dead skin cells! Heads up: They don’t die. They serve an important biological purpose as part of the skin’s essential barrier. Dead skin cells also stores NMFs, or natural moisturizing factors—basically, they’re the body’s water reservoir. The young, new skin cells underneath (you know, the ones you expose in an effort to look like glass) don’t do that. That’s why exfoliating too much can dry out the skin.

And pimples! I have come to think of pimples as a message from my body, letting me know what it needs. Cysts on my cheeks? Time to look at my hormones. Closed comedones? My skin doesn’t go into my product line. Burning cheeks? My body may be asking for vegetables instead of anything other than bagel and cottage cheese. Even if I can The Zamboni spot will go away, I won’t. They are sharing important information, people!

In fact, every form is a communication from within – even the glass itself. “A waxy, glassy, ​​shiny forehead is often associated with ‘hotness,’ which it is not,” Dr. Barbara Sturm, founder of the skin care line of the same name. once told me. “It’s a sign of injury.” Fact: Glassy skin is skin that has lost its essence leather-meat, man, his health. If you can see your thoughts in your face, it’s probably trying to tell you something—like, “Look what you’re doing to me!!!” or perhaps, “Please stop.”

If a glass skin is so unattainable and unattractive, why do we need it?

Well, for one, it’s a natural progression of unnatural beauty standards. It’s the old pressure to look like a Barbie doll, updated for the moment: We’ve swapped plastic for glass (so eco-friendly!) and the male eye for selfishness (trying to imitate an inanimate object that is itself ). – objectification in the most basic sense of the word).

But I think our phones and laptops and televisions are to blame. In an increasingly sophisticated world, everything we see is behind a shiny glass screen – and like glass, it creates a barrier. It puts you outside, looking at all the perfect people. Don’t think that people are really pixels. It’s human nature to want to join them, to want beauty, then do almost anything. I feel it, too.

If I’m being honest, when I say “I don’t want to look like a mug,” I mean appeared is, “I wish I didn’t want to look like a mug.”

I wish I hadn’t set this impossible standard. I wish I didn’t have to admit the existence of my pores and pimples. I wish I hadn’t let the condition of my skin dictate my sense of self-worth. I wish I didn’t doubt, just a little, when my boyfriend told me I was beautiful. I wish I didn’t have to convince all of us that it was okay to leave us leather be leatherbut look at me.

Skin is flesh.

It’s not a cup, and it shouldn’t be.

It often has texture and pores, and sometimes it has acne and oil slicks and inflammation.

It is alive, it is powerful, it was made by God, and it speaks to you.

Do you really want to close it because it looks like melted brown?