Skincare (Routine, Recommendations, and Talk)

[Adam Strange]

I once heard that makeup was bad for the skin. Can anyone confirm this?

Makeup is like clothes. Probably not the ideal solution, but it's what we've got.

Skin has had millions, if not hundreds of millions, of years to evolve. It's pretty amazing, and if if could be made better with the application of colored grease, we'd probably have evolved to exude colored grease.

I mean, more of it.


One way in which skin is amazing is in it's color. The major problem that humans have when they acquired large, energy burning brains, is how to get rid of the excess heat?
First, we lost our hair. Then, we got sweat glands on all exposed skin. And somewhere in there, the skin turned dark in the visible spectrum to better protect the body from ultraviolet light and in human variants that didn't get so much light, turned white. But in both cases, regardless of the skin color in the visible part of the spectrum, skin is blacker than coal dust (no mean feat) at a wavelength of ten microns. This is so it can most efficiently emit radiation away at body heat temperatures.

If you could see people at wavelengths of ten microns, they'd all look like dully glowing constructions of black, black coal dust.

But we can't see at ten microns, because the skin inside our eyes is glowing, too. It would be like having the flash inside the camera.