was lucky to grow up in a loving and prosper-
ous home, though you wouldn’t know it from the photo-
graphs. Flipping through a family album, you would see,
behind my smiles, an unearned world-weariness and an
age-inappropriate ennui. There I am, on Christmas morn-
ing, age seven, surrounded by presents and parents but
appearing, nonetheless, like I’ve just witnessed a human
rights violation. There I am again, half a decade later, pos-
ing with my little sister, ice creams in hand, grinning but
somehow also looking as though I want to die.
This is what I tell friends and doctors, facialists and
nutritionists, makeup-counter employees, concerned
Instagram commenters, nosy strangers on the street. No,
I am not tired. No, I am not sad. I am not hungover or hun-
gry. I don’t have celiac disease, and there is no black mold
in my apartment. You might not know it from looking at
me, but I like my life.
On a good day, I might describe the dark circles
under my eyes as “mauve.” On a bad day, they’re more
the color of bluefin tuna sashimi, which is to say fresh
bruises. I don’t think they make me look old, or even
ugly, really just miserable, which I’m not. I’ve spent hun-
dreds of dollars on concealers and hours upon hours on
their deployment. Some are better than others, but all
produce, to various degrees, a creepy, crepey grayness
that looks worse, in my opinion, than my bare discolored
skin. For years I found the best solution to be a distract-
ing bright red lip. That only worked for so long, though.
Now I tend to wear sunglasses—indoors.
Not long ago, a beautiful acquaintance who just so
happens to be a model learned of my so-called condition
and made for me a bespoke instructional video of herself
using a gua sha tool. The thing looks like a pale leaf but is
made of jade and is supposed to move sluggish lymph
PERSONAL QUEST
i
BRIGHT
IDEAS
We asked
dermatologists to
share their favorite
low-tech ways to make
darkness invisible.
LA ROCHE-POSAY
ANTHELIOS AOX DAILY 50
SUNSCREEN Tap it along your
eye sockets every morning.
NEUTROGENA OIL-FREE
EYE MAKEUP REMOVER
Because the culprit is often
simple: mascara residue.
FIRST AID BEAUTY RETINOL
EYE CREAM A little bit
every night thickens skin so
vessels are less apparent.
DERMABLEND
COVER
CREME IN
PALE IVORY
A high enough
pigment
concentration
to tamp
out shadows.
the lovely rock wouldn’t do a thing for my dark circles.
And just as I suspected, it didn’t.
But it did make me wonder if I shouldn’t pursue more
extreme measures. So in the following weeks, I tried
more eye creams than I ever have in the past. Some
were suffused with vitamin C; others with cucumber or
rooibos tea extract. One cost $300 and smelled like cal-
amine lotion. Like many women, I tend to think eye
cream is probably a scam but am too afraid it might not
be to refrain from spending mortgage-payment
amounts on it every year. “Picking the right eye cream
can...help,” Melissa K. Levin, a dermatologist in
Manhattan and clinical instructor at NYU Langone, told
me when I paid her a visit. Then she paused. “A little bit.”
(The ingredients she finds at least a little effective: caf-
feine for temporarily tightening puffiness, hyaluronic
acid for smoothing.) She proceeded to confirm what I
already feared was true. “Look,” she said. “Undereye cir-
cles are partly genetic, and factors like lifestyle, diet,
and allergies can make them worse. We have fat pads
that line all around our face but especially under the
eyes. As you get older, they move down and get smaller.
Pair that with the fact that the skin around the eyes is
the thinnest on the body and that it’s lining what is basi-
cally a blood-vessel-lined cavity, and, well...undereye
circles are one of the earliest signs of aging.”
I explained to Levin that while my undereye circles
have certainly worsened over the past few years (I’m 31),
they were always there. It’s a case of bad fortune, she
explained. My undereye skin is probably just exceptionally
thin, allowing blood vessels to shine through, and the
blueness is in turn exacerbated by my bone structure,
which shrouds the whole mess in shadows.
But this wasn’t my only problem, she said. There was
also the matter of hyperpigmentation, i.e., the brownish
splotches around my eyes. She told me that it was
caused in part by eczema and asked if I’d had any
adverse reactions to skin-care products recently. I
hadn’t, though I did forget to pack sunscreen on a
recent warm-weather reporting trip, and when I
returned I looked terrible. Levin suggested I undergo
MAY 2019 ALLURE 51
JOSEPHINE SCHIELE
