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Ew you have stretch marks I want to be careful how I say this because I know how it sounds. I love my daughter more than I have ever loved anything in my life. She is the best thing that has ever happened to me. I would do the four months again ten times over if she was at the end of it. And no one warned me about the stretch marks. Four months postpartum, daughter asleep down the hall, £280 spent on creams that hadn't done a single thing. The £29 oil every mum on Instagram recommends, twice a day. Cocoa butter from Boots on top. A retinol the chemist promised would work. Silicone sheets that fell off in the shower every time. Four months of smearing things on and the marks were still the same angry pink-purple they'd been the day I gave birth. That's where I was at 10:34pm on a Tuesday. Bathroom floor, door locked, empty tube of cream in my hand. Two nights later I was up at 2am with the baby on my chest, scrolling through a postpartum forum, and I saw a comment from a woman who said she worked as a dermatology nurse. She wrote one sentence I haven't been able to forget. She said almost no cream ever reaches the layer where stretch marks actually live. They form three layers down. No topical can physically get to them. I'd been spending £280 on products that never had a chance. My sister, who'd had her second baby a year before me, sent me a link a few days later. The mechanism wasn't a cream. It worked on the layer the nurse had been talking about. 11 weeks in. The texture has changed. The colour sits closer to my skin tone now. I haven't touched a cream in months.