a thing...

you are in the shower, the water is HOT (i like my shower to turn my skin a nice shade of pink much like a sunburn victim), you apply a thin layer of shaving cream, lotion or maybe you use coconut oil, whip out your razor and begin to shave.  ouch!  next thing you know the tub looks like you've severed an artery there is so much blood pouring out of the chunk you just cut out of your leg.

how does this happen?  legs are a fairly even plane.  there isn't a ton of contouring, at least not my legs.  when i start training for a body building competition i will have to update that statement but for now a fairly even plane.  you are just gliding along and then all of sudden gouge.  you would think that this would only happen to novice shavers but as a seasoned shaver i seem to do this at least once or twice a year.

for some reason thursdays seem to be a "de-furring" day, shaving my hair forest for the weekend.  plus thursdays are a kid free night for me, i guess subconsciously i am ready for whatever might happen.  which usually entails a night curled up on my couch catching up on a netflix show in layers of fleece, but hey i am ready if mr. right forever  happens to walk through my door. 

anyway, true to form i de-furred thursday morning.  as i was hydrating my freshly shaved skin and applying a little pit stick i noticed a thing in my armpit.  huh?  is that an ingrown hair?  i touched it.  nope, not an ingrown.  what is it?  i touched it again and i could grab it!  oh my word!!  what the heck is it?!  i climbed up on my counter so i could get super close to the mirror, lifted my arm high above my head just like the sure deodorant commercial, and tugged on the thing in my armpit.

a skin tag! 

eww! 

when did that get there? 

 

now, i think skin tags are weird and kinda gross, but they are also kind of remarkable things.  let's go back to the shaving of the legs for a minute.  you are running a sharp (most of the time) blade designed to slice your hair from the surface of skin in one fluent swoop.  sometimes that blade reminds you who is boss and gouges your skin.  now we go to the skin tag in my armpit.  i had just shaved that area, yet the tag still remains like a deflated balloon taped to a wall, but all the hair in my armpit is gone. 

 

how does this happen?  do skin tags and razors have some sort of arrangement where the blades magically retract to preserve the skin tag?  or maybe the skin tag is sucked into your skin while you are shaving and pops back out when the area is hair free?  i haven't the slightest idea how this works but skin tags are quite remarkable.

 

for the most part, the aging process is a piece of cake, it just happens regardless of what i do.  however, i have to be more vigilant about things; rogue hairs on my chin, the grays that stand out on my head, and now i get to add skin tags to the list, as if i didn't have enough to do.