The algorithm, the insomnia and the Korean masks
I cannot sleep. It is two in the morning and insomnia kidnaps my rest for yet another night. Insomnia and the kicks of the baby I carry in my belly. Third trimester. Today I am especially anxious because I thought I was in labor and, when I checked that for now I am not, I felt a vital need to change this month's article at the last minute and for the second time.
I cannot sleep because inside me there is a foot digging into my sternum and it makes me feel that if I open my mouth a little and say aaaaaagggghhh!, I will see five little toes rubbing against my throat. I remain wide awake and think about a series of topics I would like to write about. Mentally I start this column and change it a third time, trusting that when I wake up I will remember my imaginative, acidic, and nocturnal prose. Spoiler: it will not happen. Before, the anxiety I felt about being awake was such that I would get up drenched in a cold sweat from the tension that the nightly race against the clock hands generated in me. Not anymore. I take a book, make lists of articles, review the chores I want to do the next day and, from time to time, I turn on my mobile phone, doing exactly what you should not do when you want to sleep: contemplate a blue light and three hundred stimuli from the other side.
As if I were doing something naughty, I lower the screen brightness and put it under the sheets so as not to wake my partner. Or if I am being totally honest, so as not to hear how he tells me: “Put the phone away and try to rest, come on”. I open Instagram and my algorithm must know that from two to four in the morning I am at my peak of imbalance and it feeds me all kinds of content that I do not quite know where it came from.
Between recipes for bagels made with cottage cheese, infinite Australian waves, concerts I cannot attend (I refer you to the article about FOMO, JOMO and other obsessions that I already explained) now appear Korean influencers and their delirious skincare routines. Delirious is a mild adjective. One of them is always recording herself in bed, next to her partner, who is always busy with two lovebirds and makes funny faces every now and then while she takes out an entire arsenal of tools and gadgets that make me think she is a majority shareholder in Temu. Today I saw her with a kind of bench designed to be on the bed; she proceeded to put on a hairdresser's robe, take out a black ball from her mouth, which she inflates, I imagine, to exercise the area and avoid wrinkles, various layers of masks, mummy-like wraps, a mask that reminds me of Leo DiCaprio in the musketeers movie with LED light, and she applied about three creams and a rice pudding-like concoction she made right there, as if she were a bricklayer applying putty. Then she wrapped herself up again as if it were time to return to the pyramid to rest for another hundred years and began to rub her hair, toes, calves, knees, etc., with various rubber tools, others with pointed shapes, with little balls, and even one that looked like a curry comb for horses. Then she smeared herself with ointments, compression tapes, and I have no characters left in this article to finish describing it all.
In fact, I have never watched a full video of hers because I think I have aged in the time I am whispering mild insults at the absurdity of the situation. I, who have managed to wash my face and put on night moisturizer –at night!– and a few drops of oil and already felt like a Kardashian, wonder how many hours she must be stuck in this slave routine and the subsequent recording and editing of the Instagram reel. It must be almost impossible for her to have time to watch an episode of the series they have half-finished with their partner, or to read the book on the nightstand –which, by the way, I haven't seen any, or it is buried under single-use plastic– or to talk about how their day went or have daydreams and plans thirty years ahead. If you notice a certain tone of superiority or condescension, know that I have tried to avoid it, but it has been impossible for me. I think I will not trade my expression lines for all this stuff.
“At least she’s honest,” I justify in some way to myself. That is to say, you can see there is time and money invested in looking like a marble statue or an anime character, even though the aspirational message leaves much to be desired. I think of my goddaughters of eight and eleven years old, asking as gifts for ‘skincare’ products –and that is considering they don’t have a phone and have very limited access to screens– and about the whole Sephora Kids generation (if you don’t know the phenomenon, I recommend that you read some of the articles that exist on the subject) and the huge dermatological problem that is already beginning to arise as a result of the inappropriate use of products destined for a more mature public –such as retinol and vitamin C–: allergies, reactive acne, dermatitis… At some point, the girls went from grumbling because you put sunscreen on them at the beach in the month of August, to grabbing a product and clicking with their fingernails (ASMR effect), simulating recording themselves in a reel on TikTok and I, at two in the morning, have contributed to this little group of people having one more view. Time to turn off the mobile phone.
