I was eleven years old, sitting on the edge of a pool in Saudi Arabia, at the end of gym class.
We'd just finished our swimming unit. I was tired, a little cold, drying off with my friends around me. My back was itchy, the way it gets after chlorine. Somebody scratched it for me. Felt great. I didn't think anything of it.
I went to the change room. I caught myself in the mirror, checking myself out the way you do at that age. And on my back, in white marks against my skin, was a game of tic-tac-toe.
Not a metaphor. An actual game, drawn in white lines into my own skin, because it was dry enough to hold the marks like chalk on a board.
Here's the part I didn't say out loud at the time. I put lotion on before the other boys who looked like me could see it. Because I already knew what they'd say. I didn't have a word for what I was doing. I was eleven. But I was managing what people could see, and what they couldn't, before I understood that was a thing you could do.
Ten years later, a professor in my final year of university handed our class an assignment: find a public health problem worth studying. And something clicked that I hadn't thought about since that pool. Skin is the first thing standing between your body and the outside world. If it dries out, it cracks. If it cracks, you're not protected anymore. What I'd spent a decade treating as a joke was, underneath it, a public health question. It had been sitting there the whole time.
Right in front of us.
So I did what any twenty-something with too much conviction and not enough funding does. I built the whole thing myself. The ethics application. The survey. I stood outside washrooms asking strangers if they'd talk to me about dry skin, which is a harder sell than it sounds.
A hundred and sixty people answered. Here's what I expected to find: that some of them just weren't washing their hands enough, or weren't moisturizing, and that was the story.
That's not what I found.
Everyone washed their hands the same. There was no difference. What was different was what happened afterward. Seventy-four percent reported their skin got worse after using the soap provided. And for Black students specifically, that number, and the discomfort, and the visible cracking, was significantly higher.
One person told me: "Have lotions in the washroom or around schools like we do hand sanitizer."
That's it. That's the whole ask. Not a new policy. Not a task force. A bottle, next to a bottle that was already there.
Nobody had done that. Not because anyone decided against it. Because nobody had ever been asked to look.
Here's what I think actually happened in that washroom, and in every washroom like it.
Nobody sat down and decided not to help. There was no meeting where someone said, this isn't worth solving. The dispenser just went in, the way it always had, because that's what a dispenser looks like. Nobody was ever asked to look closer. And when nobody's asked to look, the default just keeps repeating itself, invisible not because it's hidden, but because it's never been made into a question.
That's the thing about skin. It's the most looked-at organ we have. People check their skin, their friends' skin, strangers' skin, dozens of times a day without even registering it. We are extraordinarily good at seeing skin.
We are much worse at seeing what it's telling us.
And I don't think that's really about skin at all. I think most of what shapes us hides the same way. Not because it's secret. Because it's ordinary. Because it's already there, every day, and ordinary things stop registering as things at all. You stop seeing your own kitchen. You stop hearing the hum of a fridge. You stop noticing the soap.
Noticing isn't a talent some people are born with. It's a decision to keep asking a question most of us stop asking somewhere around age eleven: wait, why is this actually here?
That's the question I keep asking. In a paper. In a lecture hall. In the work I do now. And I think it's the only question that actually moves anything. Not more information. Not more awareness campaigns. Just someone, somewhere, willing to look at the thing everyone already walks past, and actually stop.
We are often better at seeing skin than understanding what it represents.