Marvelous skin - oh, marvelous: tender and tanned, not the least blemish - - But nymphets do not have acne although they gorge themselves on rich food. God, what agony, that silky shimmer above her temples grading into light brown hair... the glistening tracery of down on her forearm.
-Nabokov, Lolita
In some cultures, retreating hairline or frosty hair are welcomed and viewed with pride, in much the same way a junior-high-schooler in America looks upon his first thin wisps of moustache fuzz. Why?
Stature in most societies depends on accumulated knowledge and refined performance. In a folk society traditions and information are passed on orally and one depends heavily on the slow process of personal experience. Thus, it is the elders who are looked to for their wisdom. We have changed this pattern with our intense formal education system so that a college graduate of 21, for example an engineer, may be placed in charge of guiding the work of many much older men, who earn far less salary and carry much less job prestige.
Though Western cultures have changed their attitudes toward aging to a great degree, our social relationships are still very age-dependent. We still cannot help but absorb the clues of age among our acquaintances and change our social posture accordingly. One of the chief clues our eyes search for is skin texture. The surface texture of ourselves and the people we meet is sort of a numerical social value, as if we wore our age stamped on our cheeks and the backs of our necks, like a quarterback emblazoned with a bright identifying number.
When in a crowd, one's eyes involuntarily skip and scan across the lines of necks, hands, eyelids, mouth corners and foreheads. If you are not accustomed to the seas of moving social information in the downtown area of a large city, people-watching leaves you exhausted in less than two or three hours. In addition to skin texture, you are decoding and piecing together all sorts of other information. Seasoned urbanites, of course, learn to function by filtering out the mass of visual social signals screaming at them from every direction by relegating people to broader classes: sexually interesting, oddies, and ordinaries. The former two are good for a quick glance but most fall into the latter category.
Young animals of many species have different texture from the adult, which gives them a special status. Among human beings it is the smooth silky soft baby skin. It is difficult for an expressive parent to keep from continually nuzzling or caressing a baby's down-soft skin. The soft velum fuzz on it is so fine that individual hairs can only be seen on close inspection. The effect produced by this fine fuzz is an overall, diffuse softness. The skin almost seems so soft that it has no distinct surface but grades imperceptibly into the surroundings. There is no gloss or highlight to the skin, either. The velum produces an eggshell or finely textured matte fabric, which accentuates the skin's smoothness.
The softness isn't just a surface phenomenon, either. The resiliency and patterning of the underlying skin fibers gives the skin an inflated look that is "wrinkle resistant." But the pillowy softness is from the underlying baby fat which is quite pronounced among properly fed babies under all areas of the skin. Thus, when you caress baby skin, not only does the surface have a downy softness, but the whole baby is like one big bundle of down in your arms. Its body is as soft to squeeze as a newly matured breast, for similar reasons.
It is easy to picture how maternal care - the attachment of the female (or parent, guardian, or relative) to the young could have evolved. Under many life-styles (but not all), those who are attracted to their young and care for them well contribute more genetic material to the next generation because of the greater likelihood of rearing their young to maturity. This selects for maternal behavior and it eventually becomes the norm.
Mothers cannot act on the rational basis of the "greater genetic contribution." Her attachment to the young must be more immediate, more organic. Behaviorally, this takes the form of a love identity, a bonding with the child so that it becomes part of herself. She responds to the child's noises and movements as end rewards in themselves and to what, in her own mind, is the inherent beauty and tenderness of the child's appearance. But just as there is a variation in the expression of maternal care, there is a variation in the desirability of children - that soft child beauty which causes a mother to love it so much that her own life would be given to preserve it. One might imagine how children's overall physical appearance could have been enhanced in time past, and still to a degree today, by how much it appealed to the mother. One doesn't have to use infanticide to account for the selection mechanism; just differences in care and attention add important life-lengthening differences.
Well before the teens and sexual maturity, the "baby fat" decreases and the skin tones harshen. The appendage hairs become coarser, but still soft and small. As a human being reaches maturity, the skin has a grainier texture, and later the granular appearance grades into fine wrinkle patterns between the deepening pits that grow into cobbly corrugations among the very old.
The rate of skin wrinkling is affected by race, use patterns, apparently a number of climatic factors (such as amount of exposure to the sun), emotional strain, and probably many other variables. The skin fibers (collagen fibers) that form the fabric of the skin are produced continually and the ones already there are not disassembled and reabsorbed, so that collagen continues to accumulate. This means a reduced resilience of the skin. With age and use, wrinkles tend to become permanently established.
The presence or absence of skin oils tends to emphasize or hide skin texture. Adult skin that is not periodically scrubbed gets an oily, greasy surface that further highlights its coarse texture. This is particularly true of the face and frontal parts of the scalp. A special organ has developed (by sebaceous gland elaboration) in this area as part of the intimidation signal. The stump-tail macaque, like man, has an inordinately well-developed sebaceous organ on the same areas of the face and the frontal part of the scalp. Males of this macaque species have a well developed sebaceous organ and females do not, suggesting that the organ has other functions than keeping the skin from drying out. Also, there is a marked increase in sebaceous activity at puberty. Sebaceous secretions are more abundant in human males than females at puberty and continue that way throughout life. In human beings the onset can be easily mapped by observing one of the more obvious products of this sebaceous increase - the teenage acne problem.
As the skin coarsens it leaves large craters into which the oil glands empty. Dirt and smoke collect in these wells and accentuate the skin texture.
The manner in which people modify their skin texture through cosmetics provides some insights into the social effects of texture. Skin coarseness can be de-emphasized by reducing the surface gloss to a "flat" or nonreflective powdered finish. Both men and women apply powder or talc to the newly-washed face to achieve this effect, returning it to the soft, velvety, velum-hair texture of youth. Nylon hose are worn to add to the smooth appearance of the legs by obliterating the irregularities magnified by the skin gloss.
Much of our cosmetic body grooming is done to effect a more smooth, juvenile complexion. We use facial makeup which obscures skin irregularities, wrinkles, and general coarseness. Sheer stockings accomplish the same thing on the legs-- the sheer nylon gives the legs an appearance of being much smoother than they really are. Degreasing by scrubbing removes the skin highlights and the rough outer layer of dead skin cells, making the skin appear more youthful-- especially when it is then dusted with powder or talc.
Dirtiness also gives the skin a coarser appearance than when it is scrubbed clean. The dark mineral particles and organics get down in the creases and follicle depressions or "pores", adding contrast, and the large particles break up the surface contours. In many hoofed animals, dirtiness is used as part of the intimidation effect, but there seems to be something quite different involved. These ungulates apparently spread their scent in the mud or dirt which serves as a vehicle to spread it over their own bodies. Elk and dogs, for example, roll in their own urine, or any strong smelling substance, for that matter.
A very grimy, filth-encrusted child is especially disturbing - rather like a dusty orchid. The contrast is so striking. On a hoary, wrinkled old man, a little dirt doesn't seem to matter so much. Dirtiness, like dark skin, seems to have a deeper social significance than a working-class stigma.
A few years ago, before the "natural look" caught on, many women spent a not insignificant portion of their time going to bed with skin creams, enduring dried clay treatments, and having facial massages in an attempt to get those wrinkles out, or simply to cover them up by laying down a "foundation" cream to give the surface a smooth texture and at the same time putty over the smaller wrinkles.
But for the most part, we are "indoor people" and have only a few skin irregularities. Now and then when we see an old dirt farmer or a picture of a Bushman, we are moved to contemplate how all our ancestors must have looked at our age, unpowdered, unkempt, wrinkled and reddened from the sun, and what gross differences there must have been between people of different ages. An old Hottentot is a study in pigskin leather.
We do, however, have the smoothest complexion of the apes. Orangs have a very knobby facial skin, with lugs like Indian popcorn - especially old males. 'Chimps, gorillas, and gibbons have dark coarse skin - not just from living in the sun, because neither of the three groups spend much time in the sun. Like human beings they exhibit both age and sexual differences in skin texture.
The values of our body's texture carry on through to our values of fabric and dress, what might be called yard-goods gender. Silks and velvets are feminine, knobby wool tweeds and coarse leather are masculine.
Much of our use of skin texture and color are covert and not obvious. But the baby bottom complexion says more about who a woman is, what she will wear, and where she is going than the social register.