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I counted them out on the bathroom counter last Tuesday. Fourteen jars, tubes, and bottles of cellulite cream. Two of them still had the plastic seal on. My name is Aubrey Hayes. I am 38. I live in Chicago and I teach pilates part-time and I write about wellness on the internet, which means I have spent an embarrassing amount of my adult life buying things that promise to fix my thighs. I have had cellulite since I was 27. Not the mild kind. Not the kind that shows up in certain lighting if you squint. The kind that is there in the morning, there at night, there when I am cold, there when I am warm, there when I have lost weight, there when I have gained weight, there when I am running four days a week, there when I am not. It sits across the back of my thighs and the underside of my glutes in these little rippled bands, and it has been there through two pregnancies and 11 years of marriage and roughly one thousand mornings of me standing in front of the mirror in my closet trying on shorts and taking them back off. Last Tuesday I emptied the bottom shelf of my bathroom cabinet onto the counter because I was looking for a nail file. What came out was a museum. I lined it all up. Fourteen. Fourteen cellulite creams, serums, oils, and one weird foam. Some of them I had forgotten I bought. Some of them I bought twice because I forgot I had already bought them once. Two still had the safety seal on because I got them, read the ingredients, felt hopeful for eight seconds, and then put them in the cabinet and never opened them. I took a picture of the lineup on my phone. I have not shown anyone. I looked at it for a long time and I did not cry, which surprised me, because a year ago I would have cried. I just felt tired in a very specific way. The kind of tired that is not about sleep. Let me walk you through the museum, because I think some of you have the same museum and we should just say it out loud. Nivea Q10 Firming, fourteen dollars, three months, morning and night. My thighs got softer to the touch and looked exactly the same. Bio-Oil, sixteen dollars, four months. Smelled nice. Did nothing. Palmer's Cocoa Butter, nine dollars, I bought it because my mom used it in the nineties and I thought maybe there was wisdom in that. There was not. Bliss FatGirlSlim, thirty-eight dollars, four months, every morning after my shower. My legs smelled like burnt coffee and the dimpling was untouched. Sol de Janeiro Bum Bum Cream, forty-eight dollars, I told myself this one was different because the girls on TikTok swore. It made my skin smell like a vacation and look exactly like it did before the vacation. Clarins Body Fit, seventy-two dollars, six weeks, gave up. Nivea Cellu-Serum roller thing, twenty-two dollars, I used it four times, the ball got stuck. Weleda Birch cellulite oil, thirty-four dollars, two months, my sheets got oily and my thighs did not change. Elemis Cellutox, ninety-two dollars, this is the one I am most embarrassed about, I bought it at an airport in a moment of weakness, six weeks, nothing. That weird foam from a targeted ad on Instagram, twenty-nine dollars, one week, it stung and I threw it out. Then a wooden cupping cup someone sent me for a brand collab, free, I used it exactly six times, bruised myself on the left thigh, quit. A dry brush from Goop that I do actually still love but for other reasons, thirty dollars. A jade gua sha tool for the body, forty-five dollars, three sessions. And one bottle of caffeine-based sculpting serum that I do not want to name because the woman who sells it is a friend of a friend. Add it up. I did. It came to six hundred and twenty-two dollars in creams and rollers and cups, spread over about seven years. That is not counting the longer shorts. That is not counting the one-piece I bought so I did not have to wear the bikini to the pool club last July. That is not counting the sarong I bought to tie over the one-piece because the one-piece was not enough. The worst part is I am not even someone who believes in miracle creams. I write about wellness for a living. I know how ingredients work. I know that most of what a topical does is hydrate the top layer of the skin and make it look temporarily plumper for about forty-five minutes. I knew, buying every single one of those bottles, that they were not going to reach whatever was actually happening underneath. And I bought them anyway. Because there was nothing else. Because trying felt better than not trying. Because a fresh jar on the counter is a little bit of hope, and hope is expensive and I kept buying it. At some point about two years ago I got serious and I booked a consultation at a med spa on the North Shore. The woman was very kind. She told me what I had was the real thing, that it was structural, that it was fibrous bands pulling the skin down in between pockets of fat and fluid, and that no cream on earth was going to reach it because it was happening three layers down. She recommended a package. Six sessions of a lymphatic and radiofrequency combo. Three hundred and twenty dollars per session. Nineteen hundred and twenty dollars for the package. I did three of them before I quit. And here is the thing I did not expect: the three I did actually worked. Not dramatically. But my legs looked smoother for a few days after each one, and I could feel that whatever they were doing in that room, with the suction wand and the heated head, was actually reaching the thing my creams could not. It was the first time in my adult life I had proof that the problem could be moved. I just could not afford to keep moving it. Nineteen hundred dollars every three months for the rest of my life is not a wellness routine. It is a car payment. So I stopped going. And when I stopped going, it came back within about six weeks, and I told myself I would figure it out later, and I bought the one-piece and the sarong and I stopped taking pictures from behind. I want to be honest with you because I think this is where most of us actually live. I gave up for about eight months. I did not buy another cream. I did not book another session. I stopped reading the articles. I wore longer everything. I turned down the invitation to my friend Sarah's fortieth in Cabo because the thought of being in a swimsuit for four days in front of a group of women I love felt like more than I could carry. I told her it was a work thing. It was not a work thing. I sat in my kitchen the night I sent that text and I ate a bowl of cereal standing up and I felt like a coward and I was. So the reason I am telling you any of this is because of my friend Cassidy. Cassidy is the friend who runs a wellness brand and knows every device that exists. She came over in September to drop off a baby gift for another friend and stayed for a glass of wine, and at some point she pulled her shorts up above her knee and said, look at this, and I looked, and her thighs, which I had seen at yoga a thousand times over the last four years, were smooth. Not filtered smooth. Not lighting smooth. Actually smooth. I sat there like an idiot with my glass of wine and I said, what did you do, and she said, I have been using this thing at home for eleven weeks, and I said, is it that clinic on Damen, and she said, no it is a device, I bought it once, it was fifty-nine dollars, it does the same three things they do at the clinic, and I have been doing it in my living room while I watch reruns. I want to say I was thrilled and I ordered it immediately. I did not. I went home and I looked it up and I read the whole website with my arms crossed. I read the good reviews. I read the bad reviews. I read the angry reviews, because those are the ones that tell you what you actually need to know. I read the return policy twice. And then, because I am who I am, I read the mechanism section three times to make sure the thing was actually doing what the clinic did and not just vibrating on my thigh and pretending. It does suction. It does heat. It does red light. All three, adjustable, in one head. Which is what the clinic was doing with three different attachments. The part that got me over the line was the guarantee. One hundred days, money back, no questions. So I did the math I have done a hundred times: fifty-nine dollars to try it for three months, versus another three hundred and twenty dollar session I was not going to book anyway, versus another jar for the museum. I ordered it on a Tuesday night in the kitchen, in my pajamas, with a lukewarm cup of tea, feeling neither hopeful nor unhopeful. Just done. It showed up in three days. I want to tell you it worked the first time. It did not. I used it that first night at level 2 because I was scared to go higher, and I felt the suction lift and the head get warm and the red light glow, and I did ten minutes across the back of both thighs, and I got off the bathroom floor and I looked in the mirror and my thighs looked exactly like my thighs. I almost put it in the closet. I texted Cassidy and I said, I think I bought another thing. She wrote back within a minute: give it four weeks. Every other night. Do not skip. Take a picture tonight and do not look at your legs in the mirror in between. So I did what she said. I took the picture. I put the device in the drawer next to my toothbrush so I would see it. Every other night after the kids were down, I sat on the bathroom floor with a podcast and I did ten minutes a leg. I stayed at level 2 the whole first two weeks because the guide that came with it said not to push it, and I actually followed the guide, which is a first for me with anything. Week two I did not see anything in the mirror. I felt something in my jeans. My high-rise jeans, the ones that had gotten tight through the thigh over the winter, closed easier. That was it. That was all I had. I almost did not count it. Week four I took the second picture and put it next to the first one on my phone, and I stood in my closet for a very long time. The dimpling on the outer curve of my right thigh, the part that had bothered me the most for a decade, was visibly softer. Not gone. Softer. The bands were less defined. My skin looked like skin instead of a topographical map. I sat down on the floor of the closet and I cried in a way I had not cried since my son was born. Not sad. Just relieved. Like something I had been carrying for eleven years had shifted about an inch to the left and I could breathe under it. Week eight I wore shorts to a barbecue at Sarah's. I did not tie a sweatshirt around my waist. I stood in her kitchen with my hip against the counter and I made a plate and I talked to her sister for twenty minutes and at no point did I calculate the angle my legs were being seen from. I did not think about my thighs. That is the thing I am trying to tell you. I did not think about my thighs. Do you understand how loud a silence that is, if you have been carrying this. I want to be careful here because I am not a doctor and I do not want to talk about this like I invented it. This is what Cassidy told me and what the website said and what my body has shown me. Cellulite is not on the skin. It is under the skin. It is fluid and fibrous bands and pockets of fat that get pushed against the surface. A cream sits on top of a problem it cannot reach, which is why fourteen creams did not move it and why one very expensive machine at a clinic could. Suction lifts the tissue. Heat softens the bands. Red light works on the layer underneath. Ten minutes, every other night, adjustable so you control the intensity, which for someone like me was the whole thing, because I wanted to feel it working and I did. So here is the math I want you to do with me, because I did it the other night and I am still a little upset about it. Creams and rollers and cups over seven years: six hundred and twenty-two dollars. Three med spa sessions: nine hundred and sixty dollars. The one-piece and the sarong and the two pairs of longer shorts: two hundred and something, I stopped counting. Backyard barbecues, pool days, one trip to Cabo I said no to, one summer of my daughter's childhood where I did not get in the water with her: I cannot put a number on that and I am not going to try. And the thing that actually worked was fifty-nine dollars, one time. I want to say something to the woman who is reading this and quietly counting the jars in her own cabinet. It was not your discipline. It was not your genetics. It was not your age or your weight or the two pregnancies or the winter you did not run. You were handed the wrong tools for eleven years. You were told a cream could fix a structural problem three layers below where a cream can reach, and then you were told it was your fault when the cream did not fix it. It was not your fault. You were doing the work with the wrong equipment. That is a completely different sentence than the one you have been telling yourself. It is the DermaQ Sculpt 3 Pro. Fifty-nine dollars. Free shipping. One hundred days to return it, no questions, no forms, no hoops. I have not been paid to say any of this. Cassidy has not been paid. There is no code. I just could not sit on the eleven-year version of this story any longer without telling someone. Aubrey Hayes, 38, Chicago. Fourteen creams. One drawer. One thing that finally reached the problem. P.S. Last week my daughter came into the bathroom while I was doing my ten minutes on the floor with my podcast in. She is ten. She watched for a second and said, mom what does that do, and I said, it makes mommy's legs feel like mommy's legs, and she said okay and walked out. And I sat there on the tile and I thought, she is going to grow up and her thighs are going to look like her thighs, and she is not going to spend eleven years building a museum in a bathroom cabinet, because I am going to tell her the truth about what actually works before she starts buying jars of hope. That is what I bought for fifty-nine dollars. Not smoother thighs. That version of my daughter. dermaqlabs.com/sale