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There is a beach towel folded in the trunk of my car that has never once touched sand. It has only ever touched the tops of my thighs. My name is Aubrey Hayes. I'm 38. I'm a mom of two, a part-time pilates instructor, and the woman at the pool who never gets in the pool. I have had cellulite on the backs of my thighs and the tops of my glutes since I was 29. Not the soft kind you can only see in bad lighting. The kind with real dips in it. The kind that catches a shadow at 2 p.m. no matter how the sun is sitting. I have been aware of it every single day for nine years. Last July we went to a friend's pool club in Lake Bluff. It was a Saturday. It was 92 degrees. Mark had the cooler. Ellie had her goggles on before we made it through the gate. Beckett was already asking who was getting in first. I had a one-piece under a linen coverup, and I had a beach towel folded over my arm, and I knew before I picked our loungers where I was going to sit and how I was going to sit there. I picked the lounger in the back row. I sat down. I laid the towel across my lap and down over the tops of my thighs. And then I sat like that for three hours. I want you to understand what I mean by that. I did not get up to get a drink. I did not walk to the snack bar with Ellie. I did not stand at the edge of the pool when Beckett did his first dive off the board, the one he had been practicing for a month. I clapped from the lounger. Mark looked back at me twice. The second time he mouthed, you okay. I nodded. I was not okay. I was doing math about how to get from the chair to the bathroom without anyone seeing the backs of my legs. When we left, I got in the passenger seat and I cried the whole way home in my sunglasses so the kids wouldn't see. Mark asked what was wrong. I said the sun gave me a headache. He knew. He didn't push. I want to list what I have spent money on before that Saturday, because I need you to see it the way I see it when I open the cabinet under my bathroom sink. Nivea Q10 Firming, $14, three months, morning and night, every single day. Nothing. Bliss FatGirlSlim, $38, four months, my legs smelled like cold coffee, my thighs looked exactly the same. Sol de Janeiro Bum Bum Cream, $48, six weeks, smelled like a vacation, did the work of a lotion. Clarins Body Fit, $86, two months, the tube I felt the guiltiest about. NuFACE body attachment, $199, three months of Sunday nights, no change I could photograph. A dry brush from Goop, $22, I still have it, it lives on a hook. A jade gua sha the size of my hand, $34, I watched three YouTube tutorials. A silicone cupping set, $28, I gave myself two bruises the size of grapes and stopped. A caffeine scrub in a black jar from Sephora, $32, half used. Weleda Birch Cellulite Oil, $32, six weeks. I could keep going. There is a Ziploc in the back of the cabinet where I put the ones I don't want to look at anymore. Add it up. That's over four hundred dollars in creams and tools that never once made me want to stand up from a lounger. Then there was the clinic. In 2022 I did six sessions of endermologie at a med spa in River North. $180 a session. The tech, a very kind woman named Renata, told me I would need eight to twelve to see anything, and then a maintenance session every four to six weeks after that, forever. By session six I had spent $1,080 and could see, if I stood in the right light, that the top of my right thigh looked slightly softer. Renata asked if I wanted to book my next block of six. I did the math in the parking lot in my car. Twelve more sessions at $180 was $2,160. Then $180 every month for the rest of my life. I never went back. I felt like an idiot for a year. So here is the part I don't put on my blog. After Lake Bluff, I stopped trying. I mean I actually stopped. I threw the Weleda oil in the trash. I bought two pairs of long linen shorts from Everlane and told myself they were for modesty, which is a word I know how to use in a way that hides other words. I skipped a pool party in August that Sarah invited us to. I said Beckett had a cough. He didn't. I told Mark I was fine. I journaled about it exactly zero times, which if you know me is how you know it was bad. In October my friend Cassidy came over on a Tuesday afternoon. She had her Stanley, I had a coffee, we were sitting on my back patio and she stretched her legs out on the ottoman in a pair of bike shorts and I looked at the back of her thigh and it was smooth. Cassidy has known me for six years. Cassidy did the same endermologie clinic I did, a year before I did. Cassidy quit for the same reason. I said, what did you do. She said, I bought a thing on the internet for fifty-nine dollars and I use it for ten minutes three nights a week. I said, no you didn't. She said, I did, and she pulled up her phone and showed me a picture of the back of her leg from March and one from September and I sat there on my own patio and did not know what to say. She told me the name. DermaQ Sculpt 3 Pro. She said it does three things at once — it sucks the skin up gently, it warms it, and it shines red light on it. She said the reason her creams never worked, and the reason mine didn't, is that cellulite isn't a skin problem. It's underneath. It's fluid and stiff bands under the skin, and a cream sits on top of a floor it can't get through. That's Cassidy talking, not me. I'm just telling you what she told me. I ordered it that night. I read the angry reviews first, because I always do. The angry ones were mostly people who used it on the highest setting on day one and bruised themselves, which honestly sounded like me from three years ago. I read the 100-day money-back guarantee twice. No forms, no hoops, no restocking. I put in my card. It came in four days. The first night I sat on the edge of my bed in the prayer corner and I almost quit before I started. It felt like a suction cup on my thigh. It was warm. It wasn't magic. I texted Cassidy. She said, don't go up a level, do Level 1 for two weeks, ten minutes, be patient, take a picture tonight. I took the picture. I hated the picture. Week two I noticed my jeans went on differently. Not looser. Just — the fabric moved over the back of my thigh in a way I hadn't felt in years. Week four I took the second picture. I put them side by side on my phone in the bathroom and stared at it for a long time. The dips on the back of my right thigh were softer. Not gone. Softer. I sent both photos to Cassidy and she wrote back one word: told you. Week eight the tops of my glutes looked like the tops of my glutes at 32. In March we went to a rented house in Rosemary Beach. There was a small pool in the back yard. On the second afternoon Ellie came running in with her goggles and said mom come on. I was reading on the couch in a coverup. I stood up. I took the coverup off in the kitchen. I walked out through the sliding door in a black one-piece and no towel. I got in the pool. I stayed in the pool. When Beckett wanted to show me a handstand, I stood in the shallow end and watched him do it, and I did not think about the backs of my legs for four hours. Mark saw me. He didn't say anything about it. He didn't have to. Here is what I understand now that I didn't understand for nine years. It was never about my discipline. I did pilates four times a week for nine years. I ate well. I drank water. My discipline was fine. It was the tools. Every single thing I bought was designed to sit on top of a problem that lives three layers under. The creams weren't lying. They were just aimed at the wrong floor. So was the dry brush. So was the gua sha. The clinic worked because it actually went under, and it cost $180 a session because you were renting somebody's hands and somebody's rent. Fifty-nine dollars, one time, is what the mechanism actually costs when you're not renting the room. Let me add it up honestly. $14 + $38 + $48 + $86 + $199 + $22 + $34 + $28 + $32 + $32 = $533 in tools and creams that did nothing. $1,080 at the clinic that half worked and would have cost me $2,160 more to finish and $180 a month forever after that. Two pairs of linen shorts I bought to hide, $148. A pool afternoon I can't put a number on. A pool party I skipped. A dive I clapped for from a lounger. Add the money part alone and it's $1,761 to hide from a problem I never actually solved. $59 to actually solve it. The DermaQ Sculpt 3 Pro is $59 right now with free shipping. You get the device, five levels of suction so you can start on Level 1 like I did, the heat and the red light, and a 90-day program that tells you exactly what to do so you don't do what I almost did on night one. The 100-day money-back guarantee is real. If it doesn't work for you, you email them, they refund you, no hoops. Aubrey Hayes, 38, Chicago. Eight months of getting in the pool. P.S. Cassidy came over last Thursday with a bottle of wine and told me Sarah just ordered one after seeing my leg on a FaceTime, which is exactly how I found out about it, and exactly how this whole thing seems to move. Quietly, between women, in a text. P.P.S. If you have been sitting under a towel — this was never your discipline. It was the wrong tools. You didn't do anything wrong. dermaqlabs.com/sale