I walk through one of the new temples of skincare that have recently opened their doors in Barcelona (equating them to a shrine is no coincidence; even though most of them have a showroom with a raw aesthetic and live immersed in the morality of plant-based... here one breathes a putrid chapel-like air) and I also review some of the millions of tutorials that teenagers dedicate to facial skin care. We know that this trend hides, as always, a horrifying B-side: this impulse for dermal perenniality ends in the madness of many young women who apply anti-aging products between 10 and 15 years old, generating a dreadful addictive behavior, not only because most children have healthier skin than an Alaskan willow, but because the obsession with maintaining an immaculate face will deprive them of one of the best assets available to human beings: aging.
As I contemplate an army of cream jars – which deconstruct the face into a multitude of specialties; from the skin of the forehead to that of the cheeks and, obviously, the most annoying of all; that of the eye bags – I remember the philosopher Lévinas, a thinker obsessed with the concept of the face, and also Guide's famous quote that Josep Pla always repeated, according to which the depth of things is usually found on the surface of the world: "the truth is in the skin". It deeply upsets me to be quoting two French authors, because most of them are tremendously corny and I detest them with great enthusiasm, but here I have no choice. Lévinas said that the human face is that entity that it is impossible for us to capture in an image. Blanca Lum Vidal summarizes it very well in her important Llegir Petit, published by Arcàdia: "in the face there is a refusal to be contained", because "its alterity is not relative, it is absolute".
The mania of castrating one's face in a perfect photograph of so many young girls – that is, violently removing it from the passage of time and the beatitude of a wrinkle or the beautiful sexuality of a scar – is one of the terrifying habits of our time. I understand Guide's quote in a Mediterranean sense, which is how Pla embraced it: often the truth is very far from philosophical pedantry and likes to hide in the most trivial. But if I literally attend to the quote, and compulsively repeat to myself that our truth is in the skin (or in that unhealthy obsession with turning it into a baby's bottom), I cannot help but feel distressed by how we are going crazy at the speed of a comet. What I explain is not a metaphysical concern: many countries of the nord enllà – where people are perhaps less crazy than in these parts – have already banned the sale of skincare products to teenagers under fifteen years of age.
Tell teenagers that a face that is too beautiful or perversely eternal, besides being false, is repulsively uglyThey do well and should be aware of the dramatic nature of the issue, because we must remind our children (and especially women, much more stressed by the panopticon of aesthetic pressure) that the symphony of life consists of several movements and that – in the end, and thanks to the god Chronos – the thing ends in an authentic cadence, drums and cymbals, and skin wrinkled like a raisin. Fortunately, I have no children, but I am scared by the enormous amount of cultural battles that parents in the world must face: before, it was enough to say "nano, please don't come home late and if you have sex, use a condom," but now we even have to warn kids about the need not to apply anti-aging cream when their face is almost as clear as a Madonna Romanesque. Really, the manual for parenthood should include a government scholarship or a tractor to be able to better haul it through the world.
I give you a piece of advice, perhaps too philosophical: tell teenagers that a face that is too beautiful or perversely eternal, besides being fake, is repulsively ugly. Remind them that their face cannot be reified, because when it becomes a fixed image it will be the living snapshot of a dead person. Finally, repeat to them that one of the great advantages of life is to grow older, to age, and that there will come a day when our face will be extinguished forever. I hastily flee the temple of skincare, as I have always found religions very tiresome. On the street, fortunately, there are normal, unphotographable faces, which today will be somewhat more like the plateaus of a papyrus.