There's something wrong with your skin

We in flyover country are blessed with never-ending supplies of Walgreens and CVS outlets. Often these personal care giants face off from opposite corners of the same intersection. No consumer escapes their gravitational pull. Should you suddenly require 1000 Q-tips a 3AM, well-lit automatic doors stand ready to slide open for you.

Modern drug stores would be mostly empty if our collective skin wasn't so evidently awful. Our pores are too big, except when they are too small. Our eyebrows extend just a little too far left or right. Our eyelashes require constant attention. Cheekbones lack definition and microscopic crinkles make us look 26 instead of 25.

There's a pill or a potion or a paint for all these issues. Once we've been convinced that there's something wrong with our skin, it's a quick trip to the personal care aisles that will solve all our problems. Long live people with substandard skin and credit cards.

Driving to Walgreens presents little challenge, but ordering skin care accoutrement online requires even less effort. In between reruns of CSI: Las Vegas we can spend precious time clicking on that which will make us prettier.

Marketing convinces you that there's something wrong with your skin and FedEX brings you relief. All you need to do is stay home and point with your mouse. No one will question your desire to self-improve. We all want to be liked: the correct shade of eye shadow might make that happen.

Obviously none among us will ever find true love until we correct obvious skin issues. Improperly chosen shades of skin paint will send potential suitors running for someone else who looks like a supermodel. It's all there in the advertising. That perfect hue and tone might just solve all our problems.

Whatever color your original skin sported, another color must be better. Peter Max never had so many choices. Picasso would be jealous. Look online for voluminous palettes suitable for graduate studies at leading art schools.

It's a great way to spend an evening. Instead of meeting people, apply color to your face and then try to meet people who prefer that skin color. We didn't evolve blue eyelids but they can be ordered online.

This stuff costs more than printer ink.

Your skin gets old and evidently that's a bad thing. You want young skin. When you're shopping for Q-tips at Walgreens you want your skin to look like it was born that morning. They might give you a discount.

Spend as much as possible on skin care products. Dab it carefully onto your exposed facial dermis, then stand back as years fall away. Expect to be carded when you try to buy lottery tickets. Your younger skin will improve your social standing among those folks who judge you by the age of your skin. A self-fulfilling prophecy, it is.

Apply it at night. As your face graces your pillow, years of age conduct themselves into your bed. The age has to go somewhere. You will wake up with a really old mattress. No one cares how old your box springs might be. As long as your face appears un-aged, life will hold promise.

We don't know what's in it. There could be plant extract from something unpronounceable. Growing in deep jungles, this hapless flora minded its' own business for thousands of years until enterprising jungle chemists smeared it onto their faces. In the hope of meeting other shallow jungle chemists they experimented with various combinations of plant extracts until their collective skins stopped aging. After that is was a short trip to your corner drug store.

Anything applied to your face should originate from a spa. The average spa rejuvenates more skin than a maternity ward. No self-respecting skin should be without spa-quality products, preferably a spa in a deep jungle. Exclusive spas spring up in jungles all the time.

Even better than spa-quality items originating in the deep European jungle are unpronounceable products with similar pedigrees. All these discoveries must be named. Scientists gather in hermetically sealed rooms to confer with marketing agents. Tongue-twisting titles inevitably result. If you can pronounce it, stay away from it.

Travel across state lines to unpronounceable locales and visit exclusive spas for unpronounceable skin-care regimens. Caring community college graduates with buttery smooth accents will tend to your needy skin. Your friends will still recognize you, but they will step back in awe of your newly crafted pores.

Your average skin needs vitamins. Herbs and minerals matter, but vitamins make the most difference. We favor Vitamin E for skin nourishment because so many products already include it. Vitamin E is a fat-soluble molecule along the lines of γ-tocopherol. Chemists know what that means and you've never seen a chemist with substandard skin, have you?

You can find Vitamin E in oils of wheat germ, sunflower, and safflower. It's considered an anti-oxidant: that always makes our skin happy. We want no oxidants near our skin, probably.

Vitamin C also makes skin look preferable. Smear an orange onto your face daily or order expensive skin treatments online. You don't actually want the skin of an orange: it's good for the orange but it won't help you land that big promotion or find everlasting love.

It's OK to combine disparate vitamins into a single skin regimen. Highly skilled facial industrial engineers toil long into the afternoon so you can get away with fewer bottles in your bathroom cabinet. They care about you and your square-footage.

It's your face. Take care of the skin covering it. No one else will do it for you. Veritable multitudes of attractive exotic products await you both online and at the corner drug store. Pick out something and get going: you're late for destiny.