Never, EVER follow any advice you read in Cosmo magazine. Ever. NEVER.
It was a few years back now. Well, quite a few years now, but who's counting? My kids were in elementary school.... I was working 3rd shift in a small rural hospital in North Carolina and it was a slow night. Somewhere between 2am-4am between patient rounds, I had some time to kill. So I was thumbing through a stack of magazines someone had donated to the hospital waiting room. (Hey, at 3am on a slow night in a mostly empty ward, a sleep-deprived nurse desperate to keep her job will do ANY thing to keep herself awake and alert and functioning)
So I browsed through about a gazillion articles about applying make-up and moisturizer and articles on painting an accent wall a bright color to highlight a room (Hey, it was the 90's! Don't judge!) and I read articles on tooth-whitening and child rearing and cancer scares...….and I even read the lame dad jokes in the 5 year old copy of Reader's Digest and took the vocabulary quiz. I was running on stale hospital coffee and mere fumes at that point.
Then I came across a Cosmopolitan magazine. I have pretty much always led a sheltered life - I was 18 years old when I got married and my husband is the only man I've ever slept with.....so most of the things in Cosmo did not apply to me in the least. I found most of it quite scandalous! I was flipping through the pages at a pretty good clip when I came across an article that caught my attention. I was hooked.
The article was about how to firm up your breasts! And after developing these pesky bodacious ta-tas when I was in the 3rd grade and then breastfeeding 2 kiddos.... and fighting my weight my entire life.....well, let's just say that was a topic near and dear to my.....heart? Sure. Let's say heart.
They listed some exercises.....some posture suggestions, some bra suggestions and then......one of the last suggestions they had was to do a "Breast-Firming Mask".....kinda like a firming facial, but not for your face. For your boobs. I was beyond intrigued! I was like....yeah, yeah on the exercises (having grown up with Jane Fonda's exercise tapes) and posture was boring.....stand up straight (easy for them to say, they don't have 50 pounds of bosoms pulling them forward chin-first!) and always wear a bra. Bra, Bra, Bra....since the third grade. Done and done.
But this boob-facial thingy.....THAT was new! That might work for me! I could certainly use a little help in the old "firmer and perkier" department! I read the article over and over again......memorized the sales-pitch and the promises of perky bosoms and I wanted sooooo much to believe in a world where that would happen for me....with an easy-peasy 20 minute magical breast-mask!
I was off the following night - so once I got home and dropped the kids off at school, I could run by Walmart and get the mask thingy and go home and use it, and still have time to take a nap before I had to get back up and go pick the kids up from school. This would WORK! I made a list for Walmart and I was soooo excited for 7am to get there so I could put my wonderful plan in motion!
7am finally came and I whisked myself home and got the kiddos delivered to their respective schools and made my way to Walmart and pursued the skin-care aisle. They had all KINDS of masks to chose from! There was a mud-mask (that sounded too messy and kinda gross?), and some kind of milk-mask for moisturizing....but that wasn't what I was looking for......I finally found one for sagging skin! YES!!!!!!!!!!! The angels sang and the sun shone round-about and I knew this was the perfect one for firming up my saggy-baggy boobies! It was a Sea Kelp and cucumber combination thing and it was bright teal colored. I bought the mask along with some a beautiful scented candle and I couldn't wait to get home and try that sucker out!
So I came home and decided that if I was going to do a spa-treatment, I should probably go all-out and make it a zen-like experience. Or what I imagined a "zen-like experience" would be like, as I had never actually experienced such a thing in real life!
I lit the candle and it smelled magical! Like the beach! Since I had a coconut-scented candle, I decided to put on my "Peaceful Ocean Sounds" meditation CD and make it feel like I was in a real spa! My bedroom in our house then had a skylight over our bed and it was about 9am and the sun was streaming in through the skylight and it felt so warm and lovely - it was like actually BEING in the sunshine at the beach!
So I stripped down to my panties and bared my chest and mixed up the mask and I remember thinking how it was so beautiful! A beautiful teal color like the waves of the turbulent sea in sunshine (I remember thinking, poetically - because that's how I typically think - poetically)......this was going to be soooooo PERFECT!!
So I smeared the teal-colored goop from under my chin to my belly button, covering all the substantial real-estate in between.....all the peaks and valleys, nooks and crannies - all covered with the cucumber-kelp blue gel. It smelled so good! And it had s little bit of a tingle - I supposed that was to let you know it was working! It was WORKING! I was gonna have perky bosoms!!!!
The candle was smelling so wonderful - like a Hawaiian Tropic dream.....and the Peaceful Ocean waves were rolling incessantly from my CD player and gently crashing on the sand and the CD even had distant sea gulls happily calling to one another - it was so realistic!!! And I positioned myself across the end of my bed on a big towel so that I didn't get the mask stuff on the sheets.....and I angled just right so the sun shone right down on me and warmed my skin and when I closed my eyes to relax for the 20 minutes the mask was supposed to take to dry.....I was able to relax and it felt just like I was laying on a beach towel in the sunshine at the beach! Oh, it was perfection, INDEED!
It was magical! So zen! the ocean wave sounds, the aroma of the candle, the warmth of the sun on my skin, the tingling of the mask and the soft scent of it - it was all soo lovely!! I was so glad I read that article! I couldn't wait to see the results! I just knew I would have perky bosoms once again!
I relaxed and enjoyed this magical spa session......which was nothing short of BLISSFUL after working a 12 hour shift with no sleep. I relaxed! I relaxed and felt like I was drifting on a cloud at the beach!! I actually must have relaxed a little TOOOO much.
Because I fell asleep in that position.
.I was having the BEST dream EVER. It was very sensual and lovely and it seemed SO real!! Until I woke up......to my horror I found my cat on my bed, licking the dried-up mask off my boobs. I had evidently fallen asleep due to sheer exhaustion and had slept solid for about 4 hours.
I quickly scooted the cat off the bed and inspected the damage. The mask dried up and was flaking off in spots.....but where the mask was thicker, it had somehow burned my skin (that "tingle" ????) and I had angry red whelps and fluid filled blisters across my chest and boobs and upper tummy. I jumped up and ran to the bathroom to look in the mirror in ABJECT HORROR. I tried to "peel" the mask, but sadly, I was about 3 1/2 hours past peeling anything......it flaked in spots, but would NOT rub off. The skin underneath was so sore and tender that scrubbing was NOT an option.
I got into the shower and tried to soak it off....but in areas where it was thicker, it gelled up like some kind of sticky, gooey, viscous teal snot that smeared and smeared, but didn't really wash off. I ended up getting out of the shower, wrapping an old towel around me and running down stairs (yes, wearing nothing but a towel, dripping wet all the way) to the garage to get my husband's Go-Jo soap (you know, that weird gray industrial strength stuff with pumice stones (and grit and possibly tiny sharp rocks and shards of glass???) ground-up into it.....it's the stuff that mechanics use to get grease off their hands?) and ran back up stairs to shower again and use the Go-Jo to try to rub this mess off my pitiful chest area. It was disastrous. And painful. And pitiful. And I cried. And I cried. And I prayed for mercy. And I might have even prayed for death (I tend to lean toward the overly-dramatic in times of frantic panic). It was hot and steamy and sticky and slime-y and painful and frustrating.
Finally, most of the crap was off my boobs and my red, raw skin was let all scratched, blistered, whelped, and very sore. It was so awful that I couldn't stand to put on a bra for a couple of days. I had to wear Mumu's in the house and wear a giant, loose t-shirt to pick up the kids at school that afternoon because I couldn't stand for anything to touch my skin.
And to add insult to injury: there was absolutely NOTHING perky or firm about me or my boobs. Other than my firm resolve to NEVER take advice from a Cosmo magazine again.
Lesson learned. I will keep my floppy boobies and simply tuck them into my bra like all the other old ladies from here on out.
And y'all. My poor cat.
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