The Joy of Zits
The news of the two nurses squeezing an unconscious patient’s spots came as no surprise to me. As a devotee of the past-time myself I understand the thrills involved, from glorious birth right through to satisfying blitz…
I’m going to sicken a lot of people here but I’m probably the only person in the world who likes having spots. I don’t have many and I don’t get them all the time, but when I do I always have great fun (no offence to those who have bad acne). It’s the excitement of feeling the initial tingle when a spot is born, then the pleasure of nurturing it and watching it grow, fed by grease, fat, dead skin cells, germs, make-up and pollution (even other people’s spots, if you get close enough). Then the moment of realisation when the spot comes to a fat white head ripe for popping… I don’t know why it is I like encouraging armed warfare on the surface of my face but it’s become an addiction. Surely what gets built up inside is better off out than in? It’s only natural.
Have to admit, though, I’m not sure if I could squeeze other people’s spots – I’d certainly have to be on pretty intimate terms with them first. My husband likes squeezing the spots on my back, sees it as some kind of romantic act of intimacy, like baboons eating each other’s fleas, and approaches it with prurient glee. But I much prefer my own. Spot squeezing is an exact science, and there’s also a fair bit of an art to it - the two girls in Kevin and Perry Go Large have got nothing on me. The process is as follows:
First of all you have to make sure you’ve got the right kind of spot. White-heads and blackheads are usually excellent for a thick liquidy discharge, although there are certain kinds of blind spots that will also provide good stringy pus that unwinds like curly-wurly worm casts on the beach. Don’t bother if you’ve just got one of those wet spots that won’t yield a thing. Better to leave it a while and see if it grows into something worth getting excited about (fertilisation may be in order - see above)… Then you have to stand exactly the right distance from the mirror in the bathroom (always has to be the bathroom), for maximum coverage, while straining to get your face in the right position so as to get the best possible view of what your doing. You also have to use a piece of tissue or toilet roll so as not to spread bacteria (if you’re into that kind of thing), and so you have enough grip and your fingers don’t slip and slide about on your skin (tissues have the edge over toilet roll as they don’t tear so easily, although kitchen roll is even better – although should never be flushed down the toilet). Then you approach the spot widely from the sides so as to reach the most effective squeezing position from underneath, pushing fingers together and squeezing upwards at the same time. Push really hard and with any luck the spot will explode and the putrid yellow pus will be ejected onto the bathroom mirror, accompanied by a vague surging sound affect, while you are left with a weeping hole.
The best spot-squeezing sessions I’ve had are the ones when the spots themselves have more than one “chamber”, so that pus comes out from different locations on the spot itself. Then there are the ones you get in the corner of your lips that you can explode just by poking your tongue on the inside of your mouth… It all happens so quickly it never fails to take you by surprise, and I long to see the whole spectacle in slow motion action replay, accompanied by a rousing soundtrack – Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, perhaps, or the theme tune to Trigger Happy TV.
Once you become well-practiced and accomplished at this skill, you can test your dexterity by arranging targets on the mirror – pictures of your boss or the office bane, for example. Get enough people interested and we could turn it into the next happening sport or means of predicting the future, like tea leaves. I’m sure that I could join up the accumulated dots on my mirror to form a really profound pattern if I tried…
Where does this lurid fascination come from? It probably has something to do with coming from a family of spot-squeezers, and having a spot-squeezing dad who was always trying to get at the blackheads in my ears when I was a kid, causing me to yell profusely. The clues were there in my childhood – bursting everyone else’s bubble gum and fairy liquid bubbles in the playground, the addiction to popping plastic bubble wrap, and the primitive urge to puncture and wither party balloons with pins. As a teenager I had something called “apocrine acne”, spots and boils in intimate places (on my knicker line, under my arms and behind my ears – areas where the body produces hair and natural musks and pheromones), and was actually medically diagnosed “too sexy” by doctors. As if this was not brilliant enough in itself, there was the additional exquisite thrill of having my boils lanced, pulling out the hair from the infected follicle so that all the gunk comes scooshing out… Oh yes, there’s nothing like lancing a big angry boil, pus spilling out of the tear leaving an empty skin sack hanging limply off the surface. I was always having cysts, sties, carbuncles and pustules all over the place. The times I’d wake up in the morning with hair sticking to the side of my face, pus all over the pillow, as if I’d been visited in the middle of the night by Fat Sam with one of his splurge guns.
The thing is, from Job’s plague of boils to Adrian Mole’s zitty chin, we’ve been lumbered with spots and we’re never going to get away from them, no matter what we do. There’s no such thing as a spot-free life. You might think you’ve been blessed with heavenly skin, but examine your chin close up in a compact and you will see hundreds of tiny pus-filled pores waiting to become full-blown spots. None of us is exempt. You can certainly lessen their impact, but you can never obliterate them completely. I tried, Heaven knows I tried. For years I tried every means available to me, succumbing to every supposed minor miracle cure – squeezing the life out of the buggers, smearing them with spot cream, covering them up with make-up, not wearing make-up, exfoliating scrubs, cleansing pads, antibiotics and industrial-strength bleach on prescription, the pill… When I reached my early twenties I was dismayed to find I was still getting them, due to hormones and due to more messing about than was good for my skin. Apparently it was overcompensating for the amount of oil I was stripping from my complexion by secreting more grease than was necessary. It was then I learned to love my wormy hoard, moisturise it and leave it be, and since I’ve been doing that my spots have repaid me by only coming out seldom enough to make it a joyous event. Think on.
© Agnetha 2002
