Jessica Anderson ad: I Study Facial Volume Loss for a Living. Here Are the 7 Things You Were Never T…

I Study Facial Volume Loss for a Living. Here Are the 7 Things You Were Never Told.

okay I don't usually post things like this but I need to because I spent two years feeling like I was going crazy and I just want someone to find this who needs it. here goes. --- Last October my daughter texted me a photo from her wedding. I was in the kitchen. Just standing there making tea. I opened it and I actually made a sound. Not a word. Just a sound. Because the woman in that photo — mid-laugh, champagne, good dress, the whole thing — she did not look like me. Not like an older me. Not like a tired me. Like someone had quietly let the air out of my face while I was looking the other way. I put my phone face down on the counter. I picked it back up. Looked at it again. Put it face down again. Tom came in and I showed it to him and he said I looked beautiful and I wanted to cry because he wasn't seeing what I was seeing and I didn't know how to explain what I was seeing and so I just said yeah and put my phone in my pocket and finished making the tea. I did not look at that photo again for three weeks. --- I'm 54. I teach high school English. I am genuinely not someone who has ever spent a lot of time worrying about aging. Grey hairs, fine lines, all of it — I'd always thought of myself as someone who wouldn't be bothered. I had been kind of smug about it honestly. I knew women who were anxious about getting older and I had privately thought I was different. I was not different. What I was, was unprepared. Because this didn't feel like aging. Aging I thought I could handle. This felt like something had been taken. The face I had known my whole life — the specific cheekbones, the specific shape of the area under my eyes, the way my mouth sat — had been slowly replaced with a different one and I hadn't been paying close enough attention to notice it happening. My outside stopped matching my inside. That's the truest way I can say it. The person I am on the inside — the one who feels 38, who laughs loudly at things, who is fully alive in rooms — she has a specific face. I know what she looks like. And she was not the woman I was seeing in photos anymore. I booked an appointment with my dermatologist. She looked at my skin — which she said was genuinely great for my age, I have been religious about SPF and she could tell — and she told me about retinol, collagen, keeping up with what I was doing. She didn't say anything about the hollows because I didn't know how to describe them yet. I left with a serum recommendation and a vague sense that I had not actually described the problem. --- The thing about hollows is they're hard to explain to anyone who doesn't have them. People think dark circles. They think tiredness. They say have you tried more sleep, have you tried drinking more water, have you tried that caffeine eye cream. And you try all of it because what else are you going to do. I tried all of it. The Ordinary Caffeine Solution first because someone in a group I'm in was evangelical about it. Six weeks. De-puffed, felt nice, did nothing for the actual hollow. By noon every day I was right back where I started, the shadow sitting there under my eye where the volume used to be. Then I upgraded because I had decided the problem was I hadn't spent enough yet. That is an embarrassing sentence to type but it is an honest one. I bought La Mer Eye Concentrate. $225. I remember standing in the Nordstrom beauty section and thinking okay this is it, this is the one, this is what all the other products were leading to. The woman who sold it to me had beautiful skin. She said it would change everything. I believed her because I needed to believe something. I used it every morning and every night for six weeks. Nothing. Not nothing like it didn't do anything nice — it was a lovely product. Nothing like the hollow was identical to the hollow that had been there before the $225 jar arrived. I sat with that jar in my hands one morning — it's heavy, that jar, satisfyingly heavy — and I just felt so stupid. Not at the product. At myself. For believing again. I tried Augustinus Bader because a woman I follow had said it changed her face. $185. My skin felt amazing. The hollow did not move. I tried retinol properly — real tretinoin, prescription strength — and my skin texture genuinely improved and the hollow was completely, entirely, utterly untouched. I tried six different concealers. I watched tutorials. I learned to do the triangle thing under the eye, the colour corrector first, the separate primer, the baking. Every single day by about noon it had settled into the hollow and I looked worse than I did before I put it on. The concealer wasn't the problem. I know that now. The hollow was the problem. But I didn't know that then so I kept buying concealers. And then — this is the part I'm a little ashamed of, but I think it's the part that will feel most familiar to some of you — I started managing. I learned which side of my face photographs better. I know now without thinking about it. I started tilting my head a certain way in photos. I raised my laptop camera so it hits me from slightly above. At family dinners I started choosing my seat near the window so the light would fall on my face a certain way. At my friend Claire's birthday in February — there was a group photo and I stepped back and said oh I'm terrible in photos, I'll take it — and her daughter looked at me like I was strange because I am not someone who has ever said that in my life. I am someone who has always been in the photos. Last Christmas I am in almost none of the pictures. I said I wanted to be behind the camera. Tom noticed eventually. Not the stepping back from photos part — he never noticed that — but one morning I was in the bathroom and he came in and said you look tired, have you been sleeping okay. I had slept eight hours. I was not tired. I said yes I'm fine and waited until he left to look in the mirror. The hollow under my left eye was casting a shadow that made me look exhausted when I wasn't. I went to work. I taught three classes. I came home. I sat in my car in the driveway for about ten minutes before I went inside. I don't fully know why. I just wasn't ready to go in yet. --- I need to tell you about the money because I think the money is part of the story. I have added it up. Properly, going back through my bank statements. Over two years: $847 on eye creams, serums, concealers, and one very expensive retinoid prescription that did genuinely help my skin texture and did nothing for my face shape. $847 on things that were solving the wrong problem. I didn't know they were solving the wrong problem. Nobody told me there was a different problem to solve. --- About three months ago I was sitting on the couch after dinner, half watching something on TV, scrolling. I had been having a genuinely good day. Nothing special — just a good ordinary day, felt like myself, taught a lesson I was proud of, laughed a lot in the staffroom at lunch. An article came up in my feed. The headline said something about why everything women try for hollow eyes has failed and that it isn't the products' fault. I almost scrolled past it. I have read a hundred things that started that way. But something — I don't know what, maybe the day I'd had, maybe just the particular way I was tired that evening — made me click on it. The article was written by a Korean formulation scientist. She had spent fifteen years studying facial volume loss specifically. And what she explained in the first few paragraphs was the first thing anyone had ever said to me that made actual sense. Here's what she said. I want to get this right because it is the thing that changed everything. Under the skin — below the layer where creams and serums and eye treatments operate — there are fat pads. Compartments of fat cells positioned at the cheekbones, under the eyes, around the lips, at the temples. They are the architecture of a face. They are what makes a face look three-dimensional instead of flat. And then she used this analogy that I've been thinking about ever since. A peach, she said, doesn't wrinkle first. When the flesh beneath the skin loses its fullness, the skin above it just follows — softening, settling, no longer held up by what was underneath. The skin is fine. It's what's beneath it that went quiet. I put my phone face up on my knee and just sat there. That was my face. That was exactly what had happened to my face. Not the skin. The filling underneath the skin. The architecture. The peach flesh, not the peach skin. She went on to explain why estrogen is part of this — it's one of the signals that tells fat pad cells to stay full — and when it drops in perimenopause it drops fast, like a cliff not a slope, which is why it felt like it happened in months and not gradually over a decade the way I had expected aging to feel. That sentence alone made me sit up straighter. I had thought I was catastrophising. I had thought I was being dramatic. It had not been dramatic. It had been a cliff. She was telling me I had experienced exactly what I experienced, and it was real, and there was a reason for it. And then she said the thing that I had to read three times. The fat pad cells don't disappear. They go dormant. They stop receiving the signal that told them to stay full. But they don't leave. They are still there. They just went quiet. I don't know how to explain what it felt like to read that. I had spent two years slowly accepting that the face I knew was gone. Just gone. That this was who I was now and I needed to find a way to be okay with that. The camera angles, the stepped-back photos, the ten minutes in the car — all of it was me finding a way to be okay with it being gone. And this woman was telling me it wasn't gone. It went quiet. And quiet is not the same as gone. I finished the article. She explained why eye creams can't reach the fat pad layer — it's an anatomical impossibility, not a formulation failure, they literally cannot get to where the problem is — and she explained what does reach it. Two ingredients. Volufiline, a lipid compound used in Korean aesthetic medicine for years that signals dormant fat pad cells to fill back in. And PDRN, a molecule that has been in clinical wound healing since the 1980s, that reactivates the fibroblast cells that go dormant at the same time. The clinical data on Volufiline showed measurable structural volume gain by imaging — not before and after photos, actual ultrasound imaging — with the top quarter of subjects showing 8.4% structural increase over 56 days. One round of filler, she said, typically delivers 1 to 3%. From a balm. At home. Without a needle. I closed the app. I made a cup of tea I didn't drink. I went to bed. For three days I thought about it and did not order it. I want to be honest about those three days because I think they matter. I had been burned enough times that even something that made complete sense — that explained everything I hadn't been able to explain — felt like a risk I wasn't sure I could take again. There is a specific feeling of hope that you develop after enough failures. It starts feeling dangerous. Like if you let yourself want something again and it doesn't work, the not-working will cost you more than the thing itself ever could. I talked myself out of it about four times in three days. I went back to the article and read parts of it again. I looked at my face in the bathroom mirror. I thought about the $847. I thought about the $29.95 for two of them with the BOGO offer and the sixty-day refund. On day three, late, after Tom was asleep, I ordered it. I took a photo the morning it arrived. Just my face, same spot in the bathroom, same light. I didn't tell Tom I was doing it. --- Week one. Nothing. I mean genuinely nothing structural. The balm itself felt different — not like a cream, more like a fine balm, absorbs in about thirty seconds and then your skin just feels normal. But nothing changed in a week. I had been warned. I had even written myself a note in my phone — it just says keep going, week one means nothing — and I looked at it on day six when I was starting to feel the familiar deflation of it not working and I kept going. Week two. My concealer started sitting differently. I know how that sounds. I know it sounds like I was looking for something to find. But I wasn't — I had genuinely stopped checking, I had committed to twelve weeks and I was trying to not watch it, and one morning I was putting my makeup on without thinking and I noticed that the product wasn't disappearing into the hollow the way it usually did. It was sitting on something. Something slightly different was underneath. I didn't say anything to anyone. I didn't even let myself think about it very much. I was afraid of it. Week three. I was walking past the big mirror in our bedroom — not the bathroom, the bedroom, the one I tend to ignore — and I caught myself and stopped. And I looked. And the under-eye area was different. Not dramatically. Not gone. But shallower. Like something very small had shifted underneath. Like the peach had very slightly re-filled from the inside. I took a photo. Bathroom, same spot, same light. I put it next to the day-one photo and I stood there in my bathroom for probably five minutes. I could see it. I wasn't imagining it. I texted my sister: something is happening. I didn't tell her what, yet. I didn't want to say it out loud. Week four. I was in the staffroom at lunch — there were four of us, mid-conversation, nothing significant — and Karen looked at me and said Veronica you look really well lately. What have you done? Have you changed your hair? I hadn't changed my hair. I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and the hollow was less. Genuinely less. Not gone. But the shadow it cast was shallower. The cheekbone area had more presence. I stood there for a long time. That evening I called my sister and told her what I'd been using. She ordered it the same night. Week eight. I stood in the bathroom in the morning light. Same spot. Same time of day. Same light. I took the photo. I put it next to the one from day one. I don't have dramatic before and after language for what I saw. I'm not going to write that I looked ten years younger because I didn't and that's not what I was looking for. What I saw was — my face. More of my face than had been there in three years. The hollows less hollow. The cheekbones present. The area beneath my eyes holding something it hadn't been holding. The corners of my mouth not pulling down the way they had been. I looked like myself. Not perfectly. Not completely. But more like myself than I had looked in three years, and I had not believed that was still possible. I sat down on the edge of the bathtub and I cried for a few minutes. Not dramatically. Just quietly, the way you cry when something you had given up on turns out to not be gone. Tom knocked on the door and asked if I was okay. I said yes, I just — I found something that worked. He didn't really understand what I meant. That was okay. --- I want to be precise about what changed, because I don't want anyone to read this expecting something I didn't get. The hollows under my eyes are less. The midface has structure it didn't have. The cheekbones are more present. My concealer goes on in the morning and stays where I put it and that is still, every single day, one of the most quietly significant things I can tell you. I still have lines. My jawline is 54. I am not pretending otherwise. What I am not is hollow. What I am not is the person who steps back from photos. My sister is six weeks in. Last week someone at her gym asked if she'd done something to her face. She hasn't. --- A few weeks ago my daughter sent me a photo from a dinner we'd had together. Candid. Someone across the table had caught me mid-story, hands going, laughing. I looked at it. Then I texted her: I love this one, can you send it to me? She sent it and said you look so like yourself in it mum. Yeah, I wrote back. Yeah. --- If any of this sounds familiar — the camera angles, the stepped-back photos, the shelf full of things that almost worked — the article I found is linked below. Read it first. It explains the science properly in a way I can't fully do justice to here. Then if it makes sense to you the way it made sense to me, Clarae is doing buy one get one right now, two balms for $29.95, and there's a sixty day full refund. I wanted to look like myself again. I didn't think I still could. I was wrong about that. — Veronica