My Poor Nozzle

A dose of hubris prevention.

I had a little mishap yesterday morning as I was performing my routine toilette.  I have the world's worst skin...oily but with dry patches, rosacea on my cheeks and a lovely breakout of adult acne along my jawline.  I won't even mention the stray eyebrows that show up on my chin on a regular basis.  Yeah, I feel pretty.

I've included a picture of myself taken first thing in the morning a while back.  I can't remember exactly why I took the picture, I think it had something to do with my hair, but there you have it.

Anyway, because of the rosacea I'm supposed to use a mild cleanser on my skin as not to irritate the affected areas.  But if I do that, the overall oily condition of my skin makes the other areas feel rough and in desperate need of exfoliation.  For that reason, I choose to exfoliate daily, rosacea be damned.

Those of you who have oily skin that is prone to breakouts can surely relate to my appreciation of a nice, course exfoliating scrub that feels like it's scraping off the top layer of skin to reveal the brand new baby soft skin underneath.  In fact, I enjoy this so much that I tend to buy the roughest, harshest facial scrub I can find.  I could care less about "gentle micro beads", I want to scrub my face with shrapnel.  That's the only thing that makes it feels clean.

So...yesterday morning I squeezed into my palm a generous blob of St. Ives Apricot Scrub: Blemish and Blackhead Control formula.  It's my favorite cheap shrapnel cleanser.  I proceeded to vigorously scrub my face with it, using both hands to spread the shrapnel to my forehead, chin, and cheeks.  My hands moved quickly in circular motions then up and down both cheeks until the pinky finger of my left hand accidentally snagged my left nostril.  Since I was in vigorous scrub mode, I didn't realize this until I had rammed my finger so far up my nose that the nail hit the base of my brain.  Since I was in the midst of scrubbing, I reflexively extracted the wayward pinky, not in the downward direction that I should have, but in a sideways motion that felt like it ripped my nostril wide open.

I rinsed my face, assessed my nostril for damage and found nothing of any significance.  But I was reminded of when Taylor was about 2 years old and was learning all the names of her body parts.  She was past the nose, ears and belly button stage and we were getting into the more detailed parts such as earlobes, fingernails and nostrils.  She had a little trouble pronouncing "nostrils" and called them nozzles.  It seemed an appropriate term, really, so we have called them nozzles ever since.