Month: November 2018

November 14, 2018 at 06:02AM Shortly after my 30th birthday, during a particularly stressful time at work, I found myself with a breakout of epic proportions. (Like, call-in-sick-so-nobody-has-to-see-me bad.) So I recruited the big guns: glycolic acid face wash, prescription retinol, and antibacterial spot treatments. But no matter how many new acne products I tried—and I tried a lot in my panicked state—my skin just kept getting bumpier and more inflamed, especially on the lower half of my face. A dermatologist prescribed me a steroid cream, which helped to a certain extent, but things never fully cleared up. For the next five years, my chin was perpetually red and covered in pimples of varying size and severity, which I blamed on stress and hormones. That is, until I went to see a new dermatologist at the end of last year, who took one look at me and told me that I wasn’t actually dealing with acne at all. Instead, she gave me an unfamiliar diagnosis: perioral dermatitis. Peri-what? “Perioral dermatitis is inflammation around the mouth that appears as small, red bumps that can be itchy or uncomfortable,” explains New York City dermatologist Dendy Engelman, MD, who notes that it’s often mistaken for acne. “This is very common in my practice—[I see] at least 8 patients a day with this condition.” No one actually knows what causes perioral dermatitis, which is found most often in women under 45, or why it only tends to affect the lower half of the face.

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November 14, 2018 at 02:00AM In case you’ve missed the kicker of every mattress commercial ever, here’s an existential crisis-inducing fact for you: Everyone spends about one-third of their lives either asleep or tossing and turning in an attempt to do so. I’d be willing to bet that, for me at least, the split between struggle and success lands at about 50/50. Even though I take a nightly five-milligram dose of melatonin, a combination of work and school (I’m earning my MFA on the side) has made my pre-snooze anxiety flare up lately. And when I turned to the sleep-tech industry to see if any solutions out there could rekindle my committed relationship with Mr. Sandman, one option stood out. Enter weighted blankets: Quilted cocoons designed with “deep pressure touch” (DPT) that has been found to decrease anxiety, improve sleep quality in insomniacs, and act as an aid in soothing children with autism. Though many companies now sell this peak hygge snooze aid, I’d heard the most about Gravity Blankets, so I decided to put the company’s space grey blanket, which costs $320, to the test. The first decision I make is to select how heavy a blanket I want to drape over my comforter for the course of the experiment. Mike Grillo, Gravity’s co-founder and president, advises choosing an option that weighs in at about 7–12 percent of my body weight. And since I sit squarely between the 15-pound and 20-pound options, I go ahead and size up. When the blanket arrives about a week

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