Get Rid of Back-of-the-Arm Bumps

Apropos of nothing, a health/beauty tip: Do you have infuriating little bumps on the back of your arms for no apparent reason, and do they get worse in winter? (Magazines, revoltingly, sometimes call this “chicken flesh,” although the scientific name is keratosis pilaris.) I do/did! And I did everything the magazines told me to do to make them go away — moisturizing, moisturizing right after I got out of the shower, exfoliating in the shower and then moisturizing right after I got out of the shower, etc. — with no change, so I figured it was a not-tremendously-devastating lost cause. But then!

Some other magazine made a throwaway comment in a beauty- or health-tips Q&A thing about back-of-the-arm bumps, and the advice was to “try a moisturizer with lactic acid for a few weeks.” Hmm, OK, why not. So I bought AmLactin Moisturizing Body Lotion (sort of expensive at $15 from CVS), used it for a few weeks, and my back-of-the-arm bumps disappeared. That’s it! The end.

I realize we all have different skins, so this won’t necessarily work for everyone, obviously, and the “for a few weeks” thing is key, because it doesn’t happen overnight. But yeah. I generally believe most products are garbage, so it’s nice to find things that work. And I sort of think of The Hairpin as like … a campfire, or something, and we’re all sitting around telling one another things.