I remember when I first learned about blackheads. I was a not-quite-teenager and I had come to terms with the fact that zits were looming in my future—weathering the years of ruined photos and traumarama school dances (lol/cry @ the idea that I’d ever get asked to a dance) seemed like a rousing, communal rite of passage that would surely unite me and my fellow pubin’-out teenagers in one giant Noxzema-encrusted surge of humanity. I was ready. I could handle it. But, until Seventeen magazine came along, nobody had yet informed me that no matter how nobly I washed and moisturized my teenage zits, the rest of my pores would inevitably become clogged with the grimy black souls of the damned and it would be my womanly duty to wage war upon them for the rest of my life. Blackheads weren’t a jazzy rite of passage, they were just evidence of a dirty face and a lifetime of failure.
Nevermind the fact that nobody I knew ever seemed to win the battle against blackheads—somebody must have won sometime! I saw it in a Neutrogena commercial! Nevermind the fact that the more time (and, much more importantly, money—always money) I spent obsessively rubbing and scrubbing my face with weird abrasive shit that Martha Quinn promised would work, the more janky and inflamed my face got. Nevermind the fact that if I had been old enough to employ shrewder critical thinking skills it would have been obvious that the only actual foolproof tool for blackhead eradication is Photoshop. Nevermind the fact that you can’t even fucking see other people’s blackheads unless you’re like an inch from their face, and there’s no judging other people’s blackheads without admitting to yourself that your pores are just as black, so WHO EVEN CARES THEN.
No, nevermind all that, because teenagers are profoundly insecure, because the “fix this or die alone and gross” messaging is strong, and because cosmetics companies make millions and millions of dollars off the intersection of those two facts.
Scientific American has an interesting piece up about the history and science behind blackheads:
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