Aubrey Hayes

There is a photo on my phone from a resort in Mexico last March. I'm sitting on the edge of an infinity pool. The water is the kind of blue that looks fake. My husband took it from behind me because I asked him to. "Just the view," I said. "Just the pool. Not me." I deleted the three he took from the front before he even handed the phone back. My name is Aubrey Hayes. I'm 38. I live in Chicago. I teach pilates twice a week and I write about wellness and faith, and I have spent the last eleven years of my life managing my body like a small business. I track my macros. I do the reformer. I drink the green thing. I get eight hours of sleep more often than most people I know. By every reasonable measure, I am someone who has "figured it out." And I have had cellulite on the backs of my thighs since I was 27. Not the soft, normal kind every woman has when she sits down. The dimpled, shadowed, looks-different-in-every-light kind that lives across the back of my legs and the bottom curve of my glutes and does not move. It does not care that I run. It does not care that I lift. It did not care when I was 118 pounds the summer before my wedding and it does not care now. It is its own ecosystem on my body and it has outlasted three apartments, two pregnancies, and one very expensive divorce from the idea that I could fix it with discipline. The pool photo was the moment I stopped pretending. I had spent the entire week of that trip choreographing my body around other people's sightlines. Walking to the pool with a towel wrapped around my hips. Getting in the water backwards. Sitting on my legs at dinner. Tucking a sarong under my thigh on the lounger so the dimples wouldn't fan out across the cushion. By Thursday I was exhausted. Not from the sun. From the math. I got home, opened the photo, and cried in the closet for forty minutes. Not because of how my legs looked. Because of how much energy I had spent that week not looking at them. So let me tell you what I had already tried. Because if you are reading this and you are the kind of woman who already knows what dry brushing is, you have earned a real answer, not a beginner's pep talk. Nivea Q10 firming cream. Eighteen dollars. Six months, every morning, both legs, the smell of it still makes me feel something. Nothing. Bliss FatGirlSlim. Thirty-six dollars. Four months. My thighs smelled like burnt coffee. The dimpling did not care. Sol de Janeiro Brazilian Bum Bum Cream. Forty-eight dollars a jar, I went through three. My bathroom smelled incredible. My legs looked the same. A dry brush from Goop. Twenty-two dollars. Every morning before the shower for almost a year. I have read every article ever written about lymphatic drainage. My skin got softer. The cellulite did not. An at-home cupping set off Amazon. Twenty-nine dollars. I gave myself two enormous bruises the size of saucers on the first try, panicked, watched four YouTube tutorials, tried again, gave myself smaller bruises, and quit by week three because I had no idea what I was doing and the cups kept losing suction halfway through. A gua sha tool for the body, rose quartz, forty-one dollars. It felt nice. It did nothing. A vibrating massage gun I told my husband was for my hamstrings. One hundred and ninety-nine dollars. I used it on the backs of my legs for six weeks. The dimpling did not move a millimeter. That is just what I can remember without opening the bathroom cabinet. The actual graveyard is bigger. And then there was the part I actually do not tell people about. I went to a body sculpting studio in River North for almost a year. Real machines, real technicians, a real receptionist who knew my name. They did vacuum therapy and radiofrequency and something with a wand that made my legs warm. Two hundred and forty dollars a session. They said I needed twelve to twenty for a "real result." I did fourteen. It worked. That is the honest part. After session ten my husband noticed. The skin on the back of my thighs looked tighter and the shadowing was softer in regular light. I cried in the car on the way home from that appointment because for the first time in a decade something had actually moved. Then I added it up. Three thousand three hundred and sixty dollars. Plus parking. Plus the babysitter for the late appointments. And the technician told me, very kindly, that I would need maintenance every four to six weeks forever if I wanted to hold the result. I did the math in the parking garage. Eight thousand a year. Forever. To rent a result I had already paid for. I stopped going. The cellulite came back in about ten weeks. I bought a one-piece for the next trip. I gave my black bikini to my younger sister and told her it didn't fit anymore, which was a lie. It fit fine. I just didn't. So when my friend Cassidy texted me last June and said "have you heard of the DermaQ" I almost ignored it. I love Cassidy. She runs a wellness brand. She also tries everything. I assumed it was another two-hundred-dollar gadget that would join the graveyard under my sink. I told her I'd think about it. Three weeks later we were at lunch and she pulled up her phone and showed me the back of her own legs in two photos taken six weeks apart. Same lighting, same bathroom, same angle. The second photo did not look like a different woman. It looked like the same woman with smoother thighs. And Cassidy, by the way, had done the same studio circuit I had. Different city, same story. Same three-thousand-dollar education. She said, "It's a real device. Suction, heat, red light, all in one head. You control every level. It's fifty-nine dollars." Fifty-nine. I read every review I could find that night, including the angry ones, which are the ones I trust. The complaints were about bruising from people who turned it up too high on day one, which honestly tracked with how I had wrecked myself with the Amazon cups. The brand has a hundred-day money-back guarantee, no forms, no return-the-box nonsense. I ordered it. The first night I sat on the bathroom floor in my robe and ran it on Level 1 across the back of my left thigh for about four minutes and felt absolutely nothing dramatic. Mild warmth. A little pull. I almost wrote Cassidy and said "is this it?" She said give it two weeks at the lowest level before you touch the higher ones. The program guide said the same thing. I listened, mostly because I wanted to. Week two I noticed it in my jeans. Not in the mirror. In the way the seam at the back of my thighs sat. Something was less puffy. Week four I took the photo. Same bathroom, same light, same time of day as the one from day one. Do not trust your eyes when it comes to your own legs. You see them every morning. You will miss the change. Trust the photo. The dimpling on the back of my left thigh was visibly softer. Not gone. Softer. The shadow that used to fan out under the curve of my glute was about half the size. I sat on the edge of the tub holding my phone and I did not cry. I just sort of stared at it. Week eight I went up to Level 3 on the suction and added the red light step at the end of each session. Ten minutes a leg, every other night, while I watched whatever I was already watching. By week ten my husband, who has not commented on the back of my legs in our entire marriage because he is a kind and intelligent man, said, "Your legs look really good." Unprompted. In the kitchen. I cried in the kitchen. Here is what Cassidy said to me at that same lunch, and I have thought about it almost every day since. She said cellulite is not a skin problem. It is underneath. It is fluid and fibrous bands and tissue three layers down, and a cream cannot reach it because a cream is sitting on top of a problem that lives underneath. The studio worked because the machine actually reached the layer. The reason every cream I ever bought failed is not that I picked the wrong cream. It is that no cream, at any price, was ever going to get there. I am not telling you that as a doctor. I am telling you what she told me, and it is the first thing in eleven years that made the failure of everything else make sense. Let me add it up for you, because I added it for myself one Sunday night and I have not been the same since. Creams and oils and serums over eleven years, conservatively: eight hundred and forty dollars. Brushes and tools and cups and the massage gun: three hundred and twelve. The studio: three thousand three hundred and sixty. The one-pieces and the longer shorts and the wraps and the cover-ups I bought specifically to hide what none of it fixed: at least four hundred dollars I can verify and probably twice that I cannot. Around five thousand dollars. To hide a problem that none of it solved. Fifty-nine dollars to actually solve it. And this is the part I want you to hear if you only read one paragraph. It was never your discipline. It was never your genetics. It was never your age or the second baby or that one summer you stopped running. It was the tools. The tools were never built to reach the place the problem actually lives. You did not fail. You were handed a teaspoon and told to dig a basement. The DermaQ Sculpt 3 Pro is fifty-nine dollars. Free shipping. One hundred days to return it for any reason, no questions, no hoops. You get the device, the head, the chargers, and a ninety-day program that tells you exactly which level to use and when, so you do not do what I did with the Amazon cups and bruise yourself on day one trying to prove you are serious. Start on Level 1. The program is built so that intensity goes up as your tissue adapts, not as your patience runs out. Aubrey Hayes, 38, Chicago. The infinity pool is on the calendar for March again. This time I am sitting on the edge facing forward. P.S. I sent the link to my sister, the one I gave the bikini to, last weekend. She ordered it the same night. I texted her: it is going to feel like nothing for two weeks. Trust the photo, not the mirror. She said okay. I think that is how this thing actually spreads. P.P.S. If you have a graveyard under your sink, you are not the problem. You were just using the wrong tools. Try the right one for a hundred days. If it does nothing, send it back. dermaqlabs.com/sale