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“She has such a pretty face; if only she would lose weight,” I overheard a relative say when I was 12. “You’re pretty—you’re just physically not my type,” a high school crush said, stopping short of saying he was into girls who wore a size 4, not a 14. When you live in a larger body, the go-to compliment about your looks almost always involves a version of “You have such a pretty face.” The unsaid part: You’re too fat to really be attractive.
And while these double-edged compliments torpedoed my body confidence, they made me feel great about my face. My near-perfect skin felt like a worthy consolation prize for the thick thighs and belly rolls. While all my high school friends were worshiping at the altar of Noxzema, I was basking in the glory of nonexistent teenage acne. In my 20s, my friends embraced the bandage-dress trend in a way I never had the guts to—but I never had to blow my entry-level salary on pricey foundation.
Then I had a baby. Just shy of 40, I woke up in the spring of 2020 covered from chin to forehead in hive-like spots. During my pregnancy, my skin had become more sensitive, and I figured this was related. But when those red marks faded to brown marks? I spiraled—and spent hundreds on every dark-spot treatment at Sephora. Nothing worked. Between adjusting to life with a newborn and working full-time, I didn’t have any bandwidth to go on a skin-sleuthing journey. And so, I decided to live with my new, muddled face.
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On weekends, I’d wear a cap and huge sunglasses to hide my splotches. Mirrors became my worst enemy, and I lived like this for over two years. Society tells overweight women that we should know better than to feel good about any part of our physicality. This must be my comeuppance, I thought.
Finally, a pal threw me a lifeline. During a late-night call, I ranted about the amount of work I had, my daughter’s inability to sleep anywhere but in my arms, and, lastly, my face’s uncanny resemblance to the spotted lantern flies that had recently infested our backyard and most of our suburban New Jersey town.
“That you can fix,” she said.
“The lantern flies?” I asked.
“Let your husband deal with those,” she replied. “I mean your spots—go to a derm for laser.”
I found my savior in Daniel Belkin, MD, a board-certified dermatologist at the New York Dermatology Group in New York City. At a moment when it felt like the old me had disappeared, he promised to restore my confidence through clearer skin.
He started with the Clear + Brilliant laser, a relatively gentle procedure that resurfaces skin to remove signs of aging and dulling. My dark spots faded after three treatments but didn’t go away completely. And then I had another flare-up of spots in the exact same places they’d been before.
Feeling hopeless, I emailed Dr. Belkin, and again he proved to be a steady, problem-solving force. Seeing my new red spots helped him figure out that I was dealing with what’s called a fixed drug eruption (FDE). FDEs are dermatological manifestations of drug reactions that appear in the same locations upon reexposure to the medication. I rarely take pain meds, but every now and again, I take something for a headache. It turns out, I was reacting to naproxen.
Hyperpigmentation from FDE tends to be deeper, so something different was in order. Dr. Belkin gave me two treatments, four weeks apart, with the PicoSure laser. This gadget removes dark spots and acne scars by delivering short pulses of energy to target areas. It stung slightly (though numbing cream helped), and my skin was left a bit more sensitive afterward, but only for a day or so.
A few weeks after my second treatment, my dark spots were gone. Poof. I wish I had tackled them sooner, because spending so long hyper-focusing on my perceived flaws did a number on me. The laser gave me my skin back, but it’s going to take a little more work to restore my self-esteem.
Bethany Heitman is Oprah Daily’s director of editorial partnerships and integration.
Bethany Heitman has spent 15 years producing content for women; she is the former editor-in-chief of PeopleStyle and has held senior leadership positions at Cosmopolitan and Seventeen. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York
