Why So Many Black Women Over 55 Are Ashy Again by Noon — No Matter How Much Lotion They Use
It was the second hymn. Everybody stood up, and I lifted my hands the way I have since I was a little girl in that same church.
That’s when I saw my arms. Under those old church lights, my forearms were gray. Not a little dry. Gray, like I had leaned on a chalkboard.
And when my hands went up, the skin above my elbows folded into little pleats. Like a paper bag that has been opened too many times.
I had put lotion on at seven that morning. A good handful. By noon it was like I never had.
I’m 61. I carried mail in Baltimore for thirty years, through rain and snow and August. I have five grandchildren.
My oldest granddaughter, Kiara, was getting married in June. I had already bought the dress. Sleeveless. Sage green.
Standing in that pew, I started planning which shawl I’d wear over it.
$6.97, $9.97, $12.49, $24.97.
So I did what we all do. I went back to the store for something stronger.
First the Palmer’s cocoa butter lotion, $6.97. My mother used it. Her mother used it. That smell is my whole childhood.
Then the Vaseline Cocoa Radiant, $9.97, the big pump bottle, because the label says it’s made for dry, dull skin.
Then a shea butter cream from the beauty supply, $12.49, because the lady at the register swore by it.
Then AmLactin, $24.97, because my dermatologist wrote it on a sticky note for me.
Every one did the same thing. Smooth and brown at seven in the morning. Gray at the elbows by lunch. Ashy shins under my stockings by the time I got home.
I started carrying a travel bottle in my purse. I was putting lotion on three, four times a day. By noon my arms still looked dusted with flour.
“I had a basket of half-used lotions under my bathroom sink. Cocoa butter, shea, the one from the doctor. A bottle in the car, a bottle at work. Still ashy by lunch, every single day.”
Denise W. · 63 · Philadelphia, PA
★★★★★
The answer didn’t come from a doctor. It came from a woman who has been looking at skin like ours up close for twenty-eight years.
“Baby, turn them around.”
Miss Yvonne has run a little skin studio in West Baltimore since 1997. She does facials, but mostly she does skin like ours. Deep brown, dark, every shade in between.
My daughter booked me a facial for my birthday. Lying on her table, I made a joke about being the ashiest woman in the choir.
She didn’t laugh. She asked what I was putting on my arms. I listed all four bottles.
She shook her head slowly. “Baby, go home and turn them around,” she said. “Read me the first word on every one of them.”
Water. Water. Water. Water.
It isn’t the brand. It’s the water.
Then I went through the whole house. The travel bottle in my purse. The hand cream by the kitchen sink. The baby lotion I keep for the grandkids. The fancy body cream my sister gave me for Christmas.
Water. First word, every single one.
When I called Miss Yvonne the next morning, she wasn’t surprised. “It’s not your bottles, baby,” she said. “It’s almost every lotion and cream in the store.”
Drugstore or department store. Seven dollars or sixty. Body lotion, hand cream, face cream, baby lotion. Water comes first on almost all of them, and it is usually around seventy percent of the bottle.
Water is the cheapest ingredient there is. It fills a big pump bottle, it feels silky going on, and it makes the price look fair.
See what Miss Yvonne had me use instead →
That still didn’t explain why it left so fast. Miss Yvonne explained that part with a pen.
Where the water goes by noon.
When you put lotion on, the water sits on top of your skin. For an hour or two, you look fine. Then it evaporates.
And it doesn’t leave alone. On thin, dry skin, the evaporating water pulls some of your skin’s own water up and out with it.
That was my clock. Lotion on at seven. Water lifting off all morning and taking mine with it. By noon, my skin had less water in it than before I started.
Ashy first. Then crepey.
Every one of us knows the word. Our mothers checked our knees and elbows at the door before church. “Go put some lotion on, you’re ashy.” Nobody ever explained what ashy actually is.
When the top layer of skin runs out of water, the dead cells on the surface dry out and lift at the edges. Dry, lifted cells scatter light instead of letting it through.
On pale skin, that just looks a little dull. On brown skin, scattered light shows up gray or white. That is the ash.
Do that every day for years, and it goes deeper than the surface.
The top layer of your skin is like a brick wall. The bricks are skin cells. The mortar between them is made of oils and waxes your skin makes itself. That mortar is what holds your water in.
When the mortar wears thin, the bricks slide apart and the water slips out even faster. Skin without enough mortar can’t spring back when you lift your arms. It folds.
That’s the crepe. Those pleats above my elbows were years of evaporating water, on skin that was running out of mortar.
Why it hits us harder after 55.
Here is what stopped me. Skin that is rich in melanin tends to lose water through that wall faster to begin with.
Researchers have measured it. Darker skin often shows higher water loss through the surface, and lower levels of ceramides, one of the key fats in the mortar.
Then menopause takes away even more. The glands that make the mortar slow way down. The wall gets thinner every year.
That’s how it goes. Ashy in the morning at forty. Ashy by noon at fifty-five. Crepey at sixty.
So our skin was already leaking faster, and we were pouring on something that leaves by lunch and takes more water with it.
“My shins in stockings looked like chalk by the time service let out. I’d go to the ladies’ room and rub lotion in with a paper towel. Nobody ever told me it was the oil my skin stopped making.”
Loretta J. · 67 · Detroit, MI
★★★★★
Put the oil back, not more water →
What about Grandma’s blue jar?
I asked her the question every one of us would ask. What about petroleum jelly? My grandmother swore by it. Knees, elbows, the backs of our hands before church.
Miss Yvonne said Grandma was half right.
Petroleum jelly seals. It sits on top like plastic wrap and stops water from leaving. That’s why your elbows look shiny right after.
But it isn’t anything your skin recognizes. It doesn’t sink in, and it doesn’t give the wall back any mortar. It just sits there, and it goes everywhere. On your Sunday dress. On the church pew. On the steering wheel.
This is where the Desert-Wax lipids come in.
So what stays put and puts the mortar back? Miss Yvonne’s answer comes from the driest place in America.
In the Sonoran Desert outside Tucson, summer days pass 110 degrees, and it can go months without rain. One shrub stays green right through it. Jojoba.
Its seeds hold something unusual. Not exactly an oil, but a liquid wax. It is the closest match found in nature to the wax your own skin makes.
The O’odham people of the Sonoran Desert were rubbing it into their skin and hair long before any drugstore existed.
Add squalane, a stable form of an oil your own glands used to make, and rice bran oil, which Japanese women have used on their skin for centuries. Miss Yvonne calls the three together Desert-Wax lipids.
Here is the whole difference. Water evaporates. Desert-Wax lipids stay. Your skin recognizes them as its own, takes them into the gaps where the mortar wore thin, and keeps its water in instead of losing it to the air.
So why isn’t it in my lotion? Because wax costs far more than water. You can’t fill a 20-ounce pump bottle with it for $9.97.
“My elbows at choir rehearsal were the first thing I checked every Thursday. Week three on the oil, I raised my hands and forgot to look. That’s when I knew.”
Carolyn B. · 70 · Memphis, TN
★★★★★
An oil with no water at all.
I wasn’t about to buy three separate oils and mix them in my kitchen. So I asked Miss Yvonne what she keeps on her own shelf.
It’s a body oil with no water in it at all. Nothing to evaporate. The Desert-Wax lipids sit near the top of the list, plus wakame, Brazil nut, passionflower and Japanese camellia.
It’s a dry oil, so it sinks in within about a minute. I put my slip on right after and nothing sticks. It has never left a mark on my church clothes. It smells faintly of vanilla, not like a candy store.
Here is what it won’t do. It won’t make 61 look 35, and it won’t fade dark spots. What it does is put the mortar back where the water kept leaving.
See today’s price on the one I use →
The three-minute rule.
Then she told me the part that matters most. When you put it on.
You have about three minutes after the shower. Pat yourself with the towel, don’t rub. Leave your skin a little damp.
Then press the oil in right away, while the shower water is still sitting in your skin. That is the one time water helps you. The lipids go on top and keep it in, all day.
Wait ten minutes and it’s already gone into the air. And you’re back to gray by noon.
She said what you want is “oiled, not greasy.” Brown and soft at noon, still soft at supper, and nothing on your clothes.
Start the three-minute rule tonight →
What changed, and when.
Night one, my arms didn’t feel tight at bedtime. I noticed that first.
Day three, I got home from Bible study at two o’clock and looked at my elbows. Brown. Not gray. I hadn’t put anything on since seven.
Week two, I stopped carrying the travel bottle in my purse.
Week four, I raised my hands in the second hymn and didn’t think about my arms at all. My sister had to point it out to me afterward.
Week six, the skin above my elbows was flatter and softer. Not twenty again. But the paper-bag folds were mostly gone. The reader photo below is close to what I saw.
“I sent my before picture to my sister as a joke. Six weeks later I sent her the after. Same elbow, same kitchen. She called me right away and asked for the name.”
Pat H. · 58 · Upper Marlboro, MD
★★★★★
June.
Kiara got married on the second Saturday in June.
I wore the sage green dress. No shawl. I hugged everybody, I did the Electric Slide twice, and I put my hands all the way up for the last song.
Nobody said one word about my arms. That was the whole point.
The Sunday after, my grandson took a picture of me on the church steps in my blue dress. “Grandma, your arms are shining,” he said. I told him it was just oil and three minutes.
“The three minutes is everything. I keep the bottle on the towel bar so I can’t forget. Two months in, and my knees don’t look ashy in my church stockings anymore.”
Ruth A. · 66 · Birmingham, AL
★★★★★
Try it for 90 days, bottles open →
Start with three bottles, not one.
One bottle lasts about thirty days. The real change shows up between week three and week six, and it keeps going after. That’s why three bottles is the one most women choose.
The pricing surprised me. Buy two bottles and the third one is free, with free shipping.
When I added up the lotion I bought last year, I had spent more on water than those three bottles cost.
Get the 3 bottles most women choose →
The oil I use
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