Confidence Doesn’t Come in a Wrinkle Cream

How I Learned to Not Completely Hate My Wrinkles

I am learning to accept my wrinkles because they let me express my emotions, like the joy and sympathy experienced while snuggling my sick nephew. A face full of Botox couldn’t show this love.

I’m not sure when they appeared, honestly. I started noticing them about two years ago — shortly before I turned 30. Had they been there long? I furrowed my brow, trying to remember. Of course, this only made them worse: those three nasty lines etched in my forehead.

At first, I panicked. I was too young for wrinkles and these weren’t “fine lines” beginning to pop up. These were deep, legit lines emblazoned across my forehead, pronouncing to the world that I was aging. Awesome.

As a loyal beauty magazine reader since about the age of ten, I decided to combat these wrinkles in the most obvious way: wrinkle cream. (I probably have been reading about wrinkle cream since that first copy of Teen, over 20 years ago.) When the “rapid” formula guaranteed to reduce the appearance of fine lines in just one week failed to do shit after two tubes, I felt frustrated, but soldiered on. I swapped brands, tried a different version for day and night, prayed. Still, those lines.

I got bangs somewhere along the line, and my friend asked if it was because of my wrinkles. This thought had not occurred to me. Did the bangs help? I wondered. It was only later I realized I should be slightly offended and/or worried my obsession over these damn expression lines had spiraled out of control.

Did you get your bangs because of your wrinkles?

My anti-wrinkle arsenal is smaller these days, but I still have a few backups in case of emergency.

While flipping through a magazine, I stumbled on an article where a dermatologist analyzed two women’s faces and recommended personalized treatments. One of the two women had forehead lines, similar to mine. Well, she was shit out of luck, according to this derm. At least when it came to topical treatments. For lines this deep, only something like Botox would do the trick.

Ohmygod, I cringed. No way. I’m barely 30. There’s no way my last resort is Botox ALREADY!

At a friend’s birthday party, she showed off her new Botox, a present from her fiancé.

“Wow,” I said, staring at her frozen forehead. “It’s really flat. I need that…”

She smiled, and examined my forehead. “Yeah,” she laughed. “You really do.” [Maybe I just needed new friends?]

I felt my situation growing more dire by the second. Not only did I have wrinkles — but they weren’t just in my head! Other people saw them too.

You really need Botox!

In a panic, I turned to the most reliable source of info I had: Pinterest. “Botox alternatives” I searched, knowing full well I didn’t have the balls or the budget to inject poison into my face. I secretly hoped I could rub some sort of oil on my face and it would do the job…isn’t that what women did in the olden days? To my delight, I found a product called Frownies, which was marketed as a “Hollywood” secret and promised to erase wrinkles and expression lines. Sold. I Amazon primed that shit before I could think twice.

In 3–5 business days, my Frownies had arrived. When I opened the package, I realized they were essentially pieces of brown craft paper with a sticky back. Basically, you moistened the back and stuck them to your face for hours at a time (overnight wear was recommended) and they would smooth out your wrinkles. Now that I held the little paper triangles in my hands, I was skeptical, but still desperate. I plastered my face and went to bed.

It took me a few tries (and a few hours trolling YouTube for how-to videos) to perfect the application of the Frownies. However, once I nailed it, I wore those in pretty much any moment I wasn’t in public. This included at night, in the office on weekends, and around the house, constantly. I am pretty sure I single-handedly convinced my roommate, Jose, that women are crazy with my face patches. I would subject him to full conversations while my face was covered in what looked like mini Nicoderm patches. Poor Jose. (Jose, I’m sorry.)

Sorry Jose, for subjecting you to this in the kitchen all the time. Although here, I’m at work. Wearing Frownies.

These little patches worked, for about the first five minutes after they were removed. I loved peeling back the edge of each triangle and revealing my smooth, unlined forehead. However, once I moved my face in any way, my lines re-appeared. Still, I persisted, a faithful user of these weird paper patches.

Since I wasn’t having any luck finding anything that completely erased my wrinkles, I decided to try some products that could at least camouflage them. Again, with the help of YouTube and Pinterest, I looked into silicone “fillers” that promised to conceal the appearence of wrinkles when used under makeup. Nope. Didn’t work. Instead of having just plain lines on my forehead, now I had weirdly colored, flaky lines on my forehead. Awesome. Totally the look I was going for.

So, after all the creams, patches, fillers and ointments I’ve tried to reduce my wrinkles, I’m left (along with my three deep forehead lines) with no choice other than to accept them. And I’m getting there.

Pinterest keeps trying to show me a beauty product that softens the look of wrinkles. It’s name is something along the lines of “Instant Confidence.” I have to admit, it sounded interesting, so I took a moment to read some of the reviews on it. God Bless the woman who wrote: “Confidence doesn’t come in a wrinkle cream.”

Hallelujah. Cue the angels singing. How spot on is that? Confidence DOESN’T come in a wrinkle cream. Or a diet. Or a boyfriend. No matter what your friends, or Pinterest or all those beauty mags try to tell you.

“Confidence doesn’t come in a wrinkle cream.”

Kevin Arnold is partially to blame for my forehead lines. Thanks, Fred Savage. (Also please note that here, a teenage Kevin has the same wrinkles that I do.)

I caught myself one day, doing my best Kevin Arnold scalp shift (if you watched the Wonder Years, you know the one), which I practiced allthetime in elementary school. Watching my face express so much emotion on my forehead made me realize:

I don’t have wrinkles because I’m old. I have wrinkles because I’m expressive. Because I laugh. I cry. (I do both a lot.) I raise my eyebrows and scowl while I’m in deep in thought. I scrunch my face up when I’m not wearing my reading glasses in exactly the same way my Grandma Menzel did, making the face that used to make my sister and I fall away laughing. My face is often a dead giveaway of how I’m feeling. (More than once in grad school, I had a friend tell me I need to wipe the disdain off my face when others were talking.) But that is me. I scrunch, I sneer and I smile. And I’ve got three deep-ass lines to prove it.

And you know what? Those lines keep looking better and better.