It's Friday afternoon and I'm having a rough day so I feel like beginning WeekendERA in earnest.
So a little background to this: about ten years ago, I first came across reports about a skin condition known as argyria. It's a pretty simple thing. You take silver-heavy products on the regular, and your skin turns blue as silver salts deposit on the surface of your skin permanently. It doesn't seem like anything worse will happen to you other than maybe your kidneys working less good and your night vision worsening-- effects are mild enough this is only speculation. In modern times, it mostly happens to health kooks who happen to believe in the potent qualities of silver as a health tonic. In older times argyria would happen to people who took too much silver-bearing anti-bacterial medicine on a long-term basis, and they suffered some pretty heavy social ostracism because of that.
But my first thought on seeing someone suffering argyria, and learning that the health effects were minimal, was... hey, that's an arresting look. Someone could make that work. Since then, I've been on-and-off fascinated by the idea of people pigmenting their skin in different weird colors as a willful choice. So on and off again, I tend to ask people a very weird question:
-If you could dye your skin some strange exotic color without there being social consequences, could you? I'm saying "exotic" specifically to denote NONHUMAN, because for God's sake this question is about radical self-presentation, not about Rachel Dolezaling yourself at will. Someone once asked me where I stood on the idea of dying your skin on a semi-permanent basis to do race lifts as a counter-question and the idea STILL freaks me out.
-Even if you wouldn't be inclined to doing that just for fun, what color would you pick? People have given me all sorts of different answers throughout the years.
That's all. Have fun with the question!
So a little background to this: about ten years ago, I first came across reports about a skin condition known as argyria. It's a pretty simple thing. You take silver-heavy products on the regular, and your skin turns blue as silver salts deposit on the surface of your skin permanently. It doesn't seem like anything worse will happen to you other than maybe your kidneys working less good and your night vision worsening-- effects are mild enough this is only speculation. In modern times, it mostly happens to health kooks who happen to believe in the potent qualities of silver as a health tonic. In older times argyria would happen to people who took too much silver-bearing anti-bacterial medicine on a long-term basis, and they suffered some pretty heavy social ostracism because of that.
But my first thought on seeing someone suffering argyria, and learning that the health effects were minimal, was... hey, that's an arresting look. Someone could make that work. Since then, I've been on-and-off fascinated by the idea of people pigmenting their skin in different weird colors as a willful choice. So on and off again, I tend to ask people a very weird question:
-If you could dye your skin some strange exotic color without there being social consequences, could you? I'm saying "exotic" specifically to denote NONHUMAN, because for God's sake this question is about radical self-presentation, not about Rachel Dolezaling yourself at will. Someone once asked me where I stood on the idea of dying your skin on a semi-permanent basis to do race lifts as a counter-question and the idea STILL freaks me out.
-Even if you wouldn't be inclined to doing that just for fun, what color would you pick? People have given me all sorts of different answers throughout the years.
That's all. Have fun with the question!
