By Ashley Fetters Maloy, Washington Post Daphney Edouard, 26, doesn’t mind being the youngest woman in her morning workout classes in Reston, Va. But every once in a while, the multi-decade age gap between Edouard, a digital producer for Sephora, and her fitness comrades makes itself glaringly evident. Earlier this year, one classmate approached her after class and gestured at Edouard’s forehead.
“She was like, ‘Tell me, what religion does that represent?’” Edouard was wearing a black, star-shaped hydrocolloid acne patch between her eyebrows. “I laughed, and she was like, ‘What’s so funny?’” Edouard recalls. “I just said: ‘I have a pimple.
This is a pimple.’” The rest of the women in her class “were surprised I wanted to wear such a vibrant, loud pimple patch to the workout class, out in public,” she says. For a few years now, pimple patches like the one Edouard had on that day – opaque, whimsically shaped, in conspicuously nonhuman hues such as bright yellow, jet black, magenta and even rainbow – have been showing up on more and more faces in workout classes, in classrooms, at workplaces and online.
Many are medicated with hydrocolloid or salicylic acid; they treat pimples while also covering them up, protecting them from both idle fingers and strangers’ stares. As a skin-care tool, pimple patches, which gained traction in the late 2010s, were a game-changing development in skin-care technology. But they’ve also become a fashion tren.
