The fountain of youth

droplette, the waste land & more work for mist-ress

Hi friends,

A few notes before we dropl’into the fountain of youth:

• I recently spoke to Dr. Bernard Beitman, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, about narcissism, mirrors, and fractals on his Connecting with Coincidence podcast. There is also a video version on YouTube.

• ICYMI, my meta-MFA essay was featured in LitHub Daily and Weekly, and (hilariously) became a topic of conversation on Hacker News thanks to my failure to write out the acronym.

• Perhaps you’ve noticed this little newsletter got a facelift! Substack chose quite useless to receive a design makeover, and I’m grateful to them for the slick new look.

I chose the peacock motif for a number of reasons: its useless beauty; its symbolic associations with luxury, vanity, and immortality. And then there’s capital-P Peacock, as in Thomas Love, the diabolically clever eighteenth-century novelist who I “grew up with” in the sense that he’s been the primary subject of my father’s scholarship for more than half a century. I’ve come to admire him in my own right, too; he’s like this naughty-Jane Austen forerunner to Oscar Wilde. Peacock’s spectral influence on my family has historically included a preponderance of art and artifacts of the namesake-bird variety, and this admittedly gave the choice a traditional flavor of the kind I like, the kind open to repartee and metamorphosis.

It’s fitting that my first peacock-emblazoned newsletter should be so excessively on-theme (beauty! luxury! vanity! immortality!), and specifically with regard to another subject on which, this time thanks to my mother’s medical specialty, I consider myself a second-hand expert: skincare.

My Droplette Micro-infuser in “Infinity Gray”

The fountain of youth used to be a myth. Now it is a mist. I mean this quite literally. I am not going to spend a lot of time explaining the (very cool, NASA-backed) fluid physics technology behind the Droplette Micro-infuser, or trying to convince you that it works; this ground has already been covered by like every beauty editor out there, including my favorite one. (“The results are astonishing.”) My primary line of inquiry here, rather, concerns the well-nigh poetic experience and philosophical implications of a device like this working so phenomenally well.¹

It is worth clarifying what exactly we mean when we say that skincare “works.” While many skin products and procedures, effective and ineffective alike, appeal to a specific concern (wrinkles, acne, pigmentation, etc.), make no mistake as to their common goal: youth. Extreme youth, frankly. While commercial ideals for other aspects of physical appearance tend to glorify teens and twenty-somethings, conventionally beautiful skin easily peaks in prepubescence, if not late infancy (a recent Goop ad, pretty standard for the genre: “wake up with baby-soft skin”). It’s a little creepy if you think about it, but then many of our most enduring parables of youth are: Benjamin Button, Dorian Gray. I could quote the latter ad nauseam here, but will limit myself to Lord Henry’s assertion that “youth is the one thing worth having.” This is basically the same sentiment Kim Kardashian expressed—exquisitely—in the New York Times’s recent coverage of her new skincare line: “If you told me that I literally had to eat poop every single day and I would look younger, I might. I just might.”

When we ask whether skincare “works” then, I’d argue we are really asking two related yet discrete questions:

1. Does the device/product/procedure successfully perform the specific action(s) it promises?

2. Does it actually make you look younger?

To illustrate this distinction, consider Botox. There’s no doubt that Botox “works” with regard to the first question—it smooths wrinkles. But the second question is trickier, offering a continuum of results, only some of which pass what I want to call the “Turing test” of youth. Now, some of the subtle artificialities of anti-aging practices have also become forms of conspicuous consumption, so that even when they fail to fully pass the “Turing test,” they still at least signal the means and leisure to try. But we shouldn’t conflate their Veblenite desirability with actual youthfulness.

It is with regard to the latter that Droplette excels so remarkably, as if fulfilling the promise of its smooth, egg-like product design and diminutive name. After using it, I can’t always tell if there’s been a change to a certain sunspot or fine line, but the overall effect is unmistakable: I look younger—not well preserved, but really, truly younger.

Preservation vs. immobility

The main pitfall of most skincare products with high efficacy in specific corrective action is basically the problem of immortality itself. What they generally offer—and this is certainly true of Botox specifically—is less rejuvenation than paralysis; a modern form of proto-mummification both compatible with and analogous to selfies in that the aesthetic price one pays for preservation is generally immobility—in a sense, life itself. You might say—and I will—that preservative anti-aging is akin to the figures on Keats’s Grecian Urn:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

       Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

               Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;

       She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

               For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

It’s a beautiful but “cold pastoral,” and this is the primary reason I haven’t tried Botox or the like (yet, anyway): I’ve been too afraid of landing on the frozen artifice side of the continuum. When I say that Droplette succeeds in true rejuvenation, I mean it avoids the preservation/immobility tradeoff entirely. It’s not unique in this regard; there are other cosmetic procedures that I think offer even more impressive rejuvenation without compromising mobility (some of the newer facelift approaches like deep-plane come to mind). But these tend to be pretty invasive, not to mention astronomically expensive. What’s so impressive about Droplette is that it offers fully-mobile rejuvenation to the upper-middle class less invasively than injectables, over-the-counter, and without pain—it’s actively a pleasure to use.

The fountain experience

Almost every time I mist my face with Droplette I think of The Waste Land, an association I could certainly see their marketing department wanting to shy away from, but the poem is so much about water and lack of water, and water and lack of water’s connection to eerily unnatural cycles of life and death and age and youth. Off the bat we have Eliot’s epigraph from the Satryicon, which, in that learnedly coy way, he’s relying on the reader to contextualize without attribution—to know that Apollo granted the beautiful Sibyl at Cumae near-eternal life (“as many years as there were grains in a handful of dust”), but without eternal youth:

Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβνλλα τί ϴέλεις; respondebat illa: άπο ϴανεΐν ϴέλω.

[I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her: ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she answered: ‘I want to die.]

Eliot includes only the Latin and Greek because he was a relentless snob, but this, snobbery included, is the pointed context that launches “April is the cruelest month.” Winter—the season of preservation—is over, and with new life, new mobility (“breeding,” “mixing,” “stirring”), comes aging—and really, what could be more cruel? There is a ton of paradoxical water language in this first section: foreboding rain, refreshing rain, “forgetful snow,” yet memories of sledding—

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

“Red rock” should really be Droplette’s next colorway. Its misting technology results in particles so fine that the sensation of using it hovers paradoxically between water and its absence, like “something different from either.” It is like water that doesn’t wet your face. The company expressly touts the deep delivery of water into your skin, this standalone benefit augmenting its active ingredients. When Eliot says “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” (you see what he did there?)—I kinda want to mist him in face and be like, “there there, it’s ok.”

Eliot returns to these same images at length in “What the Thunder Said,” and this time it reads even more to me like a fruitless quest to find the fountain of youth . . .

He who was living is now dead

We who were living are now dying

With a little patience

Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road

The road winding above among the mountains

Which are mountains of rock without water

If there were water we should stop and drink

Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand

If there were only water amongst the rock

. . . that intensifies into staccato desperation:

If there were water

And no rock

If there were rock

And also water

And water

A spring

A pool among the rock

If there were the sound of water only

Not the cicada

And dry grass singing

But sound of water over a rock

Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees

Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop

But there is no water

This whole section, by the way, comes almost directly on the back of the opposite problem—too much water, “Death by Water”:

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss.

                                   A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

                                   Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

After inserting the Droplette capsule of your choice (very K-cup like, complete with sustainable mail-order recycling program) and press the egg’s unobtrusive button to turn it on, the device cycles through three humming bursts of mist that have the predictable rhythm of stanzas. As your hand rises and falls, the mist swirling around you like a whirlpool, the particles penetrate your skin barrier, picking your bones in whispers. There are moments when it can feel like you’re drowning, particularly with the glycolic capsules—this is what the pauses between its bursts are for, to allow you to take a greedy breath in your passage from age to youth.

I can’t stop considering Phlebas, though. Or the Sybil at Cumae. I can’t decide whether Droplette is more like an anecdote to The Waste Land or an archetypal example of it. Immortal decrepitude doesn’t sound great, obviously—one understands why the Sybil wants to die. But mortal youth isn’t exactly perfect either:

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

Had a bad cold, nevertheless

Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,

With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,

Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,

(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

. . .

Fear death by water.

Mortal youth, and in particular mortal youth that’s anachronic and painstakingly sought, only has the veneer of immortality. It takes time to search for the fountain, and even if you find it, every dip in its rejuvenating waters is simultaneously a step toward death.

The erosion of uselessness

If there is any comfort to be found in The Waste Land, I have historically thought it to come from the Grecian urn side of things, from artistic preservation. (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”—note shored; we’re out of the water.) But as my anxiety now drops in an almost Pavlovian response to that first burst of mist I’m realizing there was another, rooted in something closer to Oliver Burkeman-esque peace in mortal time limitations. In this case: accepting with some “Shantih shantih shantih” that fighting age is quite useless, at best a waste of the time and youth you still do have, at worst a temporary freeze that’s gonna be really creepy when it thaws come Spring. The rational skincare ethos associated with accepting this would involve something along the lines of “morning SPF and Cera-Ve PM and go on with your life”—which is basically the crux of my mother’s professional dermatological guidance, by the way. If I wasn’t as vain as a peacock maybe I could follow it. A huge swath of products and devices out there are well-packaged, cunningly advertised snake oil. But a few aren’t; immortality is quite useless, but mortal rejuvenation isn’t—it’s just time-consuming and expensive.

The well-established problem with revolutionary consumer products is that we acclimate to them; they re-baseline our standards so quickly that they tend to leave us treading the same water we were before. I recently had a mechanical problem with my Droplette device and found myself practically quivering at the prospect of a gap in my misting regimen (don’t worry: their customer service is fantastic). The more affordable, self-administrable, and outright enjoyable rejuvenation becomes, the more Droplette may come to resemble a vacuum cleaner. More Work for Mother becomes more work for mist-ress. Not that I plan to stop using it, any less than I would my Dyson. And on mornings when I’m not in a rush, evenings when my son goes to bed easily, I still stop and luxuriate in the misting experience. But I must admit, on other days I think of the following passage from The Waste Land—some of my favorite lines, and some of its most bleak—with a little Droplette twist:

When lovely woman stoops to folly and

Paces about her room again, alone,

She mists her face with automatic hand,

And puts a record on the gramophone.

Wishing you better luck staving off the Sunday Scaries,

Natasha

1. This newsletter is in no way sponsored by Droplette—lol, the idea—but I am an embarrassingly devoted customer, and if you’d like a discount referral reply to this email or DM me and I can send you a code.