I was at the Santa Monica farmers’ market this past weekend, attempting to enjoy a ritual, intentional matcha, when I saw it. A woman—presumably in her late thirties, though her cellular matrix suggested a much darker timeline—reached for a basket of organic figs. As her arm extended out of her sleeveless linen top, the morning sunlight caught the surface of her tricep. It was dull. It was visibly textured. It was, and I do not use this word lightly, crepey. I had to sit down on a reclaimed teak bench just to regulate my nervous system.
We have, as a society, become dangerously tolerant of this kind of biological negligence. We allow people to walk among us, operating motor vehicles and participating in the economy, while their epidermis slowly surrenders to gravity and moisture loss. There was a time when maintaining a taut, radiant barrier between your internal organs and the outside world was simply the price of admission to public life. Now, it seems, people believe they have the right to simply exist in whatever state of structural decay they happen to wake up in, completely unconcerned with who might be subjected to the visual toll of their inelasticity.
The cruelty of this mindset is staggering. The modern wellness industry has removed every conceivable barrier to suppleness. We have products like Necessaire’s dry-touch formula, a remarkably accessible serum that absorbs instantly and leaves the skin looking healthier and more radiant. When you refuse to apply it, you are taking the aesthetic harmony of my Sunday morning and fracturing it with the abrasive reality of your neglected lipid barrier. You are communicating, loudly and clearly, that you do not value the visual landscape of your community.
I brought this up in the group chat, assuming my peers would share my quiet devastation. To my horror, several of them defended the fig woman. One friend—a normally reliable sounding board who recently pivoted to a “low-friction” lifestyle—suggested that perhaps this stranger simply did not have the time to massage botanical oils into every inch of her body before heading out to buy produce. Call me old-fashioned, but I find this excuse insulting to those of us who put in the work to reflect light.
If you do not have three minutes to vigorously rub Maёlys Get-Taut into your thighs until they flush with the sheer terror of botanical stimulation, you do not have a time management problem. You have a respect problem. I recently gifted a trio of these exact firming oils to my sister-in-law after noticing a troubling loss of tension around her kneecaps at a family brunch. I assumed she would welcome the intervention. Instead, she left the bottles untouched in her guest bathroom, choosing to prioritize her job and her toddler over the structural integrity of her legs. The selfishness takes my breath away.
I reached out to my personal hydration consultant to confirm that I was not losing my mind, and he assured me that my distress was entirely medically justified.
The presence of crepey skin in a public space is fundamentally a breakdown of the social contract.
People will inevitably bring class into this, because they always do. They will argue that not everyone can afford a $60 bottle of firming oil to coat their extremities before leaving the house. They will say things like, “I work two shifts at a distribution center and my uniform wicks away my natural moisture.” To which I say: we all face challenges. When I was renovating my second home in Ojai, the hard water and the stress of managing contractors nearly destroyed my décolletage. Did I give up and let my chest look like a piece of crumpled tissue paper? No. I adapted. I bought a shower filter, I doubled my Necessaire subscription, and I did the emotional labor of restoring my smoothness.
Resilience is a choice. We must demand better from our fellow citizens. We must stop pretending that “natural aging” is a valid excuse for refusing to radiate health, wealth, and suppleness at all times. The normalization of dry, textured skin is a slippery slope, and once we accept it at the farmers’ market, it is only a matter of time before we are forced to look at it in the TSA PreCheck line.
The next time I see an un-firmed forearm reaching for the heirloom tomatoes, I will not look away. I will meet their dull, inelastic gaze, I will silently hand them a travel-sized dropper of squalane, and I will wait for them to do the right thing.