My face.

 No.  I'm not going as Freddie Krueger for Halloween.  Although I may want to consider it.  Yesterday I donated my face to science.  And here are the results.  It actually looks much much worse in person.  I wish you could see it.  No, actually I don't.  No, actually I do, or I wouldn't have taken half a dozen photos of myself and put them online.

I've donated plasma, been a hair model (not like in a Pantene commercial, but as in if you let them do whatever they want to your hair, the color is free!), a mystery shopper, a taste-tester, and pimped myself out in various other completely voluntary ways, but this one is worth documenting.  It started off as an opportunity to get a scar blasted by a new laser that the staff in Ben's office were training on.  The scar is on my forehead over my right eye.  I put it there myself while testing an Ecuadorian herbal product that removes moles.  It works.

But, as happens when you go to a plastic surgeon's office (or to a Vietnamese nail salon) you get more services offered than you had planned on getting...or felt you needed.  Actually the latter part is not completely true.  I have plenty of melanin that has worked it's way up to the surface that I would love to jettison.  So when the opportunity presented itself, I capitalized.  Plus I think these procedures are really expensive.

The pictures below are from yesterday, right after the procedure.  I am intrigued by the pattern, which looks as if I fell asleep on a miniature honeycomb.  A very very hot one. I didn't get to see the laser doing it's thing because then I would be blind (or have 20/20 vision), but it felt like a fine point pen was applying molten lava on my face, accompanied by snapping and popping and the smell of burnt something...skin I guess (not chicharones).  They had kindly applied lidocaine to my face prior to, but I'm not sure it made a difference, because they hit a couple places that hadn't been numbed and it felt the same.

Yesterday it wasn't so bad, except that I looked completely ridiculous with 2 cm of Aquaphor on my face.  I would like to blame the petroleum jelly for my awful hair, but no, that's just how it looks in general.  The photos below are from today.  When I asked the doctor how much "downtime" there would be, he said only 3-4 days and you will just look like you have a sunburn.  Uh, yeah, if I lived on the first rock from the sun. But pain (and ugliness) is just hyperpigmintation leaving the body.

I had been planning on going to the gym this morning as usual.  But in an effort to not make people feel uncomfortable, I stayed home and had an ice cream bar to kick off Miles' birthday.  If my face gets worse I will make sure to let you know. 

Day Three Update - Not much better. Maybe worse. And I didn't get the 20/20 I had hoped for.

Day Five - Almost out of the woods.

Day Six - Flaky.  Not sure if my skin is better than it was 7 days ago or if it is just relatively better from a few days ago.  Ben says the results continue over a course of a few weeks.