Patchy performance

It began, as a lot of things seem to these days, with TV so bad it’s great. We were watching Bravo’s Summer House—a reality show where a bunch of people who seem attractive until you get to know them share a house and shenanigans ensue—when it struck me: every single woman’s face was sporting pimple patches.

These didn’t exist when I was a teenager, clinging to my parents’ insistence acne would disappear when I was 18 and never return (ha!). But they’re ubiquitous now: small hydrocolloid patches that get rid of blemishes fast. Using them is absolutely fine—who doesn’t want clear skin? But what’s weird is people now have no hesitation wearing them in public.

“Since I wear pimple patches as part of my nightly skincare routine, I never really thought much about wearing them during the day—and certainly not outside my house,” Tiffany Dodson Davis wrote last year in a Harper’s Bazaar article titled “Does everyone just wear their pimple patches in the wild now?”. “But nowadays, it feels like …