Slughead

Fran Magazine: Issue #139

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Notes on skincare

I am often complimented on the quality of my skin, but it has not always been this way. For years I suffered from painful cystic acne, enduring multiple forms of medication (accutane, antibiotics, etc.) that made me sick in all kinds of ways (tummyache, nosebleed) in an attempt to fix my complexion. Once I went home from work because my face had such a profound allergic reaction to a medication that it got all pink and puffy and painful, like I had stood out in the sun too long. I stood in the bathroom at the office, trying to see if cold water from the sink would soothe the pain, but it didn’t, so I went home. I convinced myself during this time that being concerned about my skin was a shallow and not especially life-threatening concern that I should be embarrassed about trying to fix. I’ve since come to believe that not wanting your face to hurt or bleed all the time is totally fine. For the past five years, I’ve been able to keep my skin under control through a combination of spironolactone and tretinoin and [celebrity voice] drinking a lot of water. I get maybe two cystic zits a year. I am probably wise enough to only pick at one of them.

This past winter, however, my skin got bad again — it got dry. I have always had dry skin as opposed to oily skin, and when my skin gets especially dry, it sloughs off my face, peeling and flaking and crusting over. It’s been a dry winter just about everywhere, to be fair. I’m still getting the odd nosebleed first thing in the morning. I began the year in Colorado where the air is much more dry than New York, returned to my radiator-blasted apartment where we keep the overhead fan running to off-set the heat,¹ and then I went to Utah for work. In Park City, my skin was worse than ever. My makeup was not adhering to my face at all, but rather sitting atop a surface of dry, textured skin. No amount of moisturizer was helping.

In a moment of desperation, I found a tube of Aquaphor in my jacket pocket² and decided to try slugging, a thing I’d long seen people do on Instagram and TikTok and Reddit. The conceit of slugging is that after you wash your face at night and do your lotions, serums, toners, etc.³ you then add an occlusive product like Aquaphor or Vaseline on top of your face to lock in everything else you’ve just put on it and whatever moisture your body has. I saw endless Reels of women whose faces were shiny with clearish goo and thought to myself, “there’s no way this is a good idea.” I solicited a few opinions on slugging and figured there could be nothing worse than trying. After years of letting dermatologists do whatever they want to my skin, I’m pro-experimentation. I put about big pea-sized amount of Aquaphor on my face and neck, my skin shiny with grease, half-convinced that I’d wake up with a face full of zits as if I’d slept on a piece of pizza.

Lo and behold: the slugging worked. In the light of day, my skin was firmly stuck to my face. I could put makeup on top of it. Everything stayed where it was supposed to be.

Since January, I’ve slugged at least twice a week to tremendous results. (Important: I never slug on the nights I use tretinoin, the latter of which which I’ve cut back on due to the dryness of the air this winter.) Not only is my skin clear and shiny, but it just feels better on my face. I no longer feel cracks of the edges of my lips or flaking at the base of my nose. I feel like whatever people say collagen does to your skin is what’s happening to me. I’ve received more compliments on my skin in the past few weeks than I have in any other year in recent memory. “It’s the Aquaphor,” I keep saying.

I had been skeptical about slugging for years, because I thought it was an exercise in bizarre overcorrection: I saw too many skincare influencers just piling it onto their faces. I’d come to believe in slugging the way I believe in something like mouth-taping, a thing that is probably helping for about 0.4% of the people who actually do it and everyone else is doing too much and refusing to see an ENT. Besides, all that goop was going to stain my pillows, I figured. Though the method is no less logical than sleeping in gloves and socks to avoid dry hands or heels, I thought it looked insane. I was convinced it would be like when I eat too much salt on an airplane and break out in a single zit, or that I would wake up with hair stuck to my face, or that my pores would be full of crap. It helped to learn in the process of googling “slugging skincare reddit” that you’re not supposed to be putting globs of Vaseline all over your face but rather just enough that it ought to dissolve before you fall asleep.

an image like this is yay to me

A tale of two discontinuations

For a number of years, my go-to winter moisturizer was the First Aid Beauty ultra repair cream. I had some this year that I felt was not doing its job, and then lo and behold…

In the interim, one of Phil’s friends who has the most perfect skin I’ve ever seen in my life (and one of the cutest cats) recommended a Korean beauty brand called SKIN1004. I bought a handful of sample-sized products to see how they’d go and I loved them, especially the SPF. I’ve gone through a few different moisturizing sunblocks in my day, and I find many of them quite irritating, either making my eyes water or skin peel or whitecast or some combination of all of those. The SKIN1004 SPF was lightweight, blended in with my tinted moisturizer (which also has SPF), and smelled like nothing. I was in hog heaven, and then:

can’t this country do anything right

“When they recall a skin product, that’s really bad,” a friend said, “but when they say the FDA hasn’t approved an ingredient, that usually means it’s better than anything you can get in the States and our country just hasn’t caught up yet.” I don’t remember who said this, but I believed them with full and unyielding faith. I bought a giant thing of sunscreen before they discontinued US sales through the official site⁴ and I hope it lasts me the summer so I can responsibly be out in the sun as much as possible. Otherwise I’ll have done all that slugging for nothing.

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What kind of goop are you putting on your face right now? Have you tried slugging? Have you ever skimmed off the top of a partners’ products and found it better than whatever you own? Are MEN using SERUMS or just WINGING it?

1. “Why don’t you just turn off the heat?” I hear you asking — I have and I do, sometimes, but often our apartment cannot sustain its heat for more than a few days. The cold air, however, is just as dry at the hot air.

2. I get tattoos just often enough to justify having Aquaphor in most rooms of my home.

3. I actually don’t use toner… because my skin is so dry I’ve never found a need or use for it that doesn’t just dry me out further. That said, if you have a non-drying toner recommendation, I’m all ears.

4. I guess I could buy international, but the tariffs…?