Why does it have to be OIL of Olay?!?!

I hate lotions. They are so oily and greasy and dirty feeling. I hate special cleansing soaps. They are way too time consuming. I hate pretty much anything that takes time or feels oily. I take off my makeup and clean my face all at once and without having to use any water every night with a good old Oxy pad. If you’re wanting to find out what face cleansing ritual is best, certainly don’t ask me.

However, over the past few months, I have started to notice something. I’m aging. It’s quite the surprise. I’ve always been the youngest everything.

When I was 16, I went on a 6 week long missions trip to Cyprus to be an administrative assistant to a missionary. I flew back all by myself. When I was going through customs in New York, the customs agent looked at me very suspiciously, looked at my passport, looked at me, looked at my passport, then said “Do your parents know where you are?”.

The month after that (still 16), I started working in a real office with a real job for one of the companies that I still work for to this day. I was the “child” of the office, and everyone babied me and couldn’t believe how young I was. Some people still think I’m the child of the office.

I started college at 17 and graduated at 21. My most insane professor had this rant one day about that all of us should be voting in the presidential election that year, and made us raise our hand if we weren’t registered to vote. I was the only one brave enough to raise my hand, and he accusingly and agressively asked me why not. I explained that you had to be 18 to vote, and he looked at me like I was a freak, and said “you’re not 18?!?! WHAT are you doing in college???”.

I got married when I was 19. I absolutely loved everyone’s reaction when they would meet me and find out I was married, then proceed to ask how old I was. They always assumed that I was some rebellious teenager that had eloped against my parent’s wishes. I would calmly explain that my parents were a) fully aware that I was married, and b) were completely supportive of said marriage.

Plus, Chris is 5 1/2 years older than me, so that has always helped me feel young too. Especially when we were first dating and married and I was still a teenager.

So anyway, now that I’m 26, getting old is coming as a bit of a shock to me. I have started noticing wrinkles. Not terrible ones, but wrinkles none the less. I see lines that stay after squinting or smiling for a while that didn’t used to stay there. I see wrinkles around my eyes when I smile that didn’t used to wrinkle there. I especially noticed in our recent family pictures as compared to the family photos we had done just six months earlier.

See? January 2008: no wrinkles around the eyes when smiling:

July 2008: Wrinkles!! I think they’re even referred to as crow’s feet!!! Horrors!!
So after pondering these changes for several months and then having it so obvious in the pictures (don’t tell me you can’t see it. It’s SO there!!), I finally decided to do something about it. I have a tendency, if addressing a problem, to want to take care of it once and for all and just go all out. So I start in Sephora. I look at all of the $50+ bottles of 1/2 an ounce of miraculous wrinkle-away serum. I look at the Holy Grail of wrinkle remover, $130 stri-vectin.

Lucky for my budget (all of this would be coming out of my spending money, so it would only affect me, not Chris or Ali. Our wonderful love of budgeting is another blog for another day, but get this – budgeting is FREEING, people!! You never have to feel guilty about spending money again!! As long as you’re within the budget, of course. But, I digress).

As I was saying, lucky for me, Ali and I were at the mall to have lunch with my good (and practical) friend, Ashley (and AJ). I told her about my wrinkle woes, and she said (after assuring me that I wasn’t a wrinkly prune, of course) that Oil of Olay worked just fine, and that I should try that first. So I went to CVS that afternoon and got a night cream and a day cream. Not only was it on sale AND had free samples of face cleansing wash with it, but I got $10 extra bucks for buying it!! So I got it for about half the price, and am giving it a try.

I’ve been using it for about a week now, and I, of course, hate it. I hate oily stuff, and the stuff is called Oil of Olay! But I really think I would hate any sort of anything. I also hate the day cream because it apparently has a slight sunless tanning tint to it, and so the smell of it reminds me of my very destructively vain teenager days (destructive because I was so vain I would use sunless tanners that turned me a sickening streaky orange color that I actually thought looked good.)

ANYWAY, so I’m old. I’m using old lady cream, and let’s hope it works. When we get Ali’s 2 year old pictures in January, I’ll be able to compare my wrinkles and see I miraculously look 10 years younger. That is, assuming that I can keep torturing myself with oily nasty lotion twice a day.