Goodbye Fraaackles, Hello Bubbles

It’s a terrible feeling when the beautician administering your facial gasps in horror. Especially when the gasp is followed by a string of panicked Ilonggo, wherein the only words you can understand are:

“Fraaackles and wrankles! Oh ma’am, oh my, oh dear.”

The visit to Salon U-Ropa was far from the relaxing experience I had hoped for. Mind you, having your pores extracted one at a time by an over-diligent pinoy beauty graduate using a pair of crude metal tongs and a sharpened spike has never been a walk in the park. Eight months in the Philippines have taught me that beauty is pain though, and pain beauty. That is all I know and all I need to know: throbbing discomfort invariably yields devastatingly sexy results.

On this occasion however, the shock of the assistant was quite beyond anything I had expected or mentally prepared for. It was an unbridled and genuine lament for the state of my wrinkly, freckled skin: a pain so consuming that I wanted to weep for the years of abuse I had knowingly perpetrated.

“Melfade ma’am, gusto mo ang melfade?” A sense of urgency had overtaken the conversation. I tried to respond but a squeak was all that would surface.

“Hay naku! Huo, sige, palihog. Gusto ko...” Quick, I thought, before I get any older or uglier.

Admittedly, I didn’t know what I was buying, but at three dollars I figured I couldn’t go wrong. Fifteen minutes later, upright and enjoying the rushing high caused by fumes from the pure alcohol unguent the assistant had just removed from my face, I was introduced to MELFADE.

Let me paint the picture: Two smiling, nodding assistants in white beauty technician coats reverently turn and jointly place a mysterious indigo block in a taut plastic wrapper on the counter. The block is devoid of any words saving seven very important capitalised letters.

“MELFADE. Twice a day ma’am. Wala fraackles,” the taller one purrs quite seriously.

With MELFADE in my bag I felt strangely confident on the way home.

Elizabeth Gets Burned – Some Relevant Background

I don’t usually put anything on my face without knowing exactly what it is. I was literally burned in Mrs Hennessey’s year seven science class when, fulfilling my dual role as resident smart ass and village idiot, I grabbed a piece of metal from the lab bench and proclaimed to all within earshot “Hey look everyone! The zinc’s on my face now. No more sunburn!” A searing sensation in my cheeks, producing a smell not unlike that of raw steak when it first hits the grill, had alerted me to the hydrochloric acid on the metal surface long before my class mates could even laugh mercilessly.

After a stint in the nurse’s office with an ice pack on either cheek, I’d vowed never to be so reckless with acid ever again. Regardless of whether I have kept that promise or not, I felt some research on the subject of MELFADE was certainly required.

MELFADE – The Research

MELFADE stands for “melanin fade”. Melanin is the pigment in fraackles, the one that makes them go dark when you reject a vampirific lifestyle to recklessly hang out in the sunlight for 27 years. (Whoops, naughty me.)

A classic example of what happens when MELFADE meets melanin is Michael Jackson’s face.

Given that research is for boring losers who spend too much time at university anyway, chimpanzees and Neverland, here we come.

The Great Beauty Experiment

I’ve been MELFADing for about a week now, and have noticed some definite results. Firstly, my bathroom sink has turned bright red, except for the bit where the MELFADE sits, which has gone stark white and wrinkly.

I went snorkeling at an old ship wreck on Saturday and a fish tried to eat my face, although it was really only a nibble. I’m not sure if this was related to my use of MELFADE or not, but it could well be.

Likewise, an old lady on the bus to Sipalay sat erotically close to me for several hours. I think she might also have been attracted to my ethereal MELFADE whiteness. Either that, or she was just trying to avoid the balut vendor who had cozily positioned his armpit in her face.

My freckles are still in fine form, if not enhanced by last weekend’s two hours of snorkeling on a remote Filipino island somewhere off the coast of Negros and the fact that MELFADE actually works better on skin that doesn’t have melanin in it.

Lastly, I’d like to note that I haven’t as yet engendered a deep and lasting relationship with a great ape. This is probably because, unlike Michael Jackson and Diane Fossey, I don’t know any great apes well enough to take it to the next level. But on the bright side, there’s always next week.

And that’s the great thing about life, I guess: you just never know where it might take you. If humans disappoint you there’s always a lonely chimpanzee out there somewhere.