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There is a beach towel folded in the trunk of my car that has never once touched sand. Navy and white stripes. My mother-in-law gave it to us the summer we bought the house. It has been in the back of three different cars and it has never been laid out on a beach, never been sat on, never dried a single person off. It has only ever been used for one thing, which is to cover the tops of my thighs. Last July we went to a friend's pool club out past Lake Bluff. It was a Saturday. Ninety-two degrees. My son Beckett had been practising a dive off the low board since the middle of June, in the shallow end at the Y, over and over, the way an eight-year-old does when he has decided something matters. He had been telling people about it for a week. He told the man at the hardware store. We got there at eleven. My husband Mark had the cooler. Ellie, who is ten and has recently decided she is above enthusiasm, had her goggles on before we were through the gate. And I knew, before I had even picked our loungers, exactly where I was going to sit and exactly how I was going to sit there. I chose the back row. There were two free in the second row nearer the water and I walked past them and took the back row and told Mark the light was better. I sat down. I took the towel out of the bag. I laid it across my lap and down over the tops of my thighs, and I smoothed it flat at the edges the way you would tuck in a child. And then I sat like that for three hours. I want you to understand what I mean by that, because I do not think it sounds like much written down. I did not get up to get a drink. Mark brought me one. I did not walk to the snack bar with Ellie when she wanted a slush — I gave her a five and let her go on her own, which she was thrilled about, and which I have not stopped thinking about since. And I did not stand at the edge of the water when Beckett finally did his dive. He came up out of the pool and turned around looking for me, and I was thirty feet away in the back row, and I clapped with my hands up high so he could see where I was. He swam over afterwards, hanging off the edge with his chin on the tiles, absolutely delighted with himself, and he said, "Mom, come in. It's not even cold." And I said, "In a minute, baby." He asked me three more times that afternoon. Around two, around three, and once more at about half past four. Each time I said something slightly different and each time it meant in a minute. By five he had stopped asking. He was busy. There were other kids by then. It was not a tragedy for him — that is the thing I want to be clear about. Nothing bad happened to my son that day. He had a wonderful time. On the drive home I cried the entire way with my sunglasses on, looking straight ahead, while he talked about the dive from the back seat. He noticed anyway, the way kids do. He said, "Mom, are you sad?" And I said the sun had given me a headache. He said, "You should drink water." Let me back up. My name is Aubrey Hayes. I am 38. I live in Chicago, in a house we have been in for nine years, with Mark and the two kids and a dog called Biscuit who officially belongs to Ellie and actually belongs to whoever is standing nearest the treat cupboard. I run a sales team. Fourteen people. I have been doing it for eleven years and I am good at it. I close things other people cannot close. I stand up in front of rooms. I have an entire closet of dresses for exactly that. I say this because I want you to understand that I am not a person who falls apart. I am the person other people call when something has fallen apart. And I have had cellulite on the backs of my thighs and the tops of my glutes since I was 27. Not the kind you only see if you press on your skin under a bad light. The kind with real dips in it. The kind that is there standing, sitting, walking, doing absolutely nothing at all. The kind that catches a shadow at two in the afternoon no matter where the sun is sitting. Eleven years. I have been aware of it every single day for eleven years. It got worse slowly, and that is the part nobody warns you about. It does not happen on a Tuesday you can point at. It creeps, and you adjust, and each adjustment is so small and so sensible that you never notice you are making one. First I stopped wearing the two-piece I liked and bought a one-piece. Perfectly reasonable. More practical with kids anyway. Then I bought a cover-up for the walk from the lounger to the water. Also reasonable. Sun protection. Then I started keeping the cover-up on *in* the water, which is where it stopped being reasonable, although I did not think so at the time. Then two pairs of long linen shorts from a shop in Bucktown that I told Mark were for hiking. We do not hike. Then the towel across the lap, which I genuinely do not remember starting. At some point it simply became a thing I did, the way you put a seatbelt on. Every one of those was a small sensible decision, and together they added up to a woman who had not been in a swimming pool with her own children in about four years. I did go to a doctor about it. Once, in 2021. A dermatologist in Lincoln Park — Dr. Reyes — and I want to be fair to her, because she was not unkind and she was not rude about it. She looked, she asked two questions, and she told me the truth as she understood it. It is extremely common. It affects most women. It is largely genetic and hormonal. It is not a medical problem. And there is not much that reliably works. She said all of that in about ninety seconds, kindly, and then asked whether there was anything else. I said no. I paid the co-pay at the desk. I sat in my car in the parking garage on Level 3 for about twenty minutes before I drove home. Here is what I had spent money on before that Saturday at the pool. I am going to be specific, because "I tried everything" is what people say when they mean they tried two things. Nivea Q10 Firming, fourteen dollars. Every morning and every night for three months. Never missed once. Nothing. Bliss FatGirlSlim, thirty-eight dollars, four months. My legs smelled like cold coffee. My thighs were identical. Sol de Janeiro Bum Bum Cream, forty-eight dollars, six weeks, because everyone on my phone was using it. It smelled like a holiday and did the work of a lotion. Clarins Body Fit, eighty-six dollars, two months. That is the tube I felt worst about. A dry brush I bought after watching a woman in a video say to always brush upward toward the heart in long firm strokes. Twenty-two dollars. Every single morning before my shower for six months. My skin turned pink. The dips did not move. A jade gua sha the size of my hand, thirty-four dollars, three YouTube tutorials deep. A silicone cupping set, twenty-eight dollars, which gave me two bruises the size of grapes in the first week and lived in a drawer after that. A caffeine scrub in a black jar, thirty-two dollars, half used. Weleda birch oil, thirty-two dollars, six weeks. A foam roller. A vibration plate that cost two hundred dollars and lived under our bed for a year before I gave it to a woman from work. Six sessions of lymphatic drainage at a place in River North. A hundred and twenty dollars each. And here is the thing about those — they worked. Genuinely. I walked out every single time with legs that looked smoother and felt lighter. And it was gone by the following weekend every single time. When the therapist told me I would need to come weekly to hold it, I sat in the parking lot and did the arithmetic and never went back. That is over five hundred dollars in creams and tools, plus seven hundred and twenty at the clinic, on a problem I had not moved a millimetre. But the part I found hardest was not the money. It was that my family had quietly arranged themselves around it. Mark stopped suggesting the beach. Not pointedly. He just stopped. We used to go to the dunes in August, and at some point we started going to a state park with a lake we never swim in. My sister has a pool at her place in Naperville and she stopped saying "bring your suits" when she invited us. She just started saying "come over." Ellie asked me to get in the water with her when she was about six. Twice. And then never again. Nobody ever had a conversation about it. Nobody said a word. They all just adapted, the way you step around a piece of furniture in a hallway. Every one of them would tell you they were being kind, and they *were* being kind, and I hated all of it. Because I did not feel like a woman who could not go in a pool. I felt exactly like I did at 27. I still wanted to do the thing. Get in the water. Lie on a beach. Wear the two-piece I gave to my sister three years ago and never replaced. My body kept telling a different story than the rest of me did. The night after Lake Bluff, once the kids were in bed, I did something I have not told anybody about until right now. I got a yellow legal pad out of the kitchen drawer and I wrote down the things I had stopped doing. Getting in a swimming pool with my children. Wearing anything above the knee between May and September. Sitting cross-legged on the floor at birthday parties in shorts. Standing up first at the beach, instead of waiting until everyone else was already walking ahead of me. Getting out of the water at the lake without first checking who was on the shore. Buying a swimsuit I actually liked instead of one that covered more. Sarah's pool party in August, which I said no to because Beckett had a cough. He did not have a cough. It filled most of the page. And the worst part was not any single line on it. It was the pattern. It was realising I had spent about six years quietly, politely accepting a smaller and smaller version of my own summer — and that nobody had stopped me, because everybody around me had decided this was just a preference I had. I did not sleep much that night. In March I went away for a long weekend with my friend Maya. Maya is 40. We have known each other since we were 24, when we were both temping at a place on Wacker that no longer exists. She is a corporate lawyer, she works more than I do, she has two kids, and she is the most direct human being I have ever met. She does not do small talk. She has called me at 7:15 in the morning and started a conversation in the middle of a sentence as though we had been on the phone all night. Maya has also, in the entire time I have known her, seemed at ease in her own body in a way I have quietly envied since we were 24. We were by the pool on the second afternoon. I was in long shorts and a tank top. She was not. She stretched her legs out on the lounger next to mine, and I caught myself staring at the back of her thigh, because something was different from the last time I had seen them, which had been a while. She noticed. Of course she noticed. She said, "What?" I said, "Your legs. What are you doing?" And she laughed, and then she said the thing I very nearly cried at, on a sun lounger, at two in the afternoon. She said, "Mine used to be worse than yours." She said the words *worse than yours* out loud. Nobody had ever admitted, in eleven years, that they could see it. Not Mark. Not my sister. Not the dermatologist, who called it common. Everybody had been carefully saying nothing for a decade, and Maya just said it, and it was the kindest thing anyone had done about this in my entire adult life. She told me she had done the same clinic I had, a year before I did. She quit for the same reason I did — she did the arithmetic at the desk. And then she told me the thing that reframed eleven years for me in about four minutes. She said cellulite is not fat. If it were fat, thin women would not have it and men would have it more, and neither of those things is true. She said it is not a skin problem either, which is why it was never going to respond to anything I put on my skin. Underneath your skin there are tough fibrous bands. They run down from the surface and tie your skin to the layer underneath it. In the gaps between them, soft tissue pushes up. So the skin gets pulled down where the bands hold it and pushed up everywhere else, and those tie-down points are the dips. That is all a dimple is. A place where the skin is anchored. And on top of that, there is fluid that should be draining out of the tissue and is not. It sits there. It raises the pressure. The pressure makes all of it more visible — which is also why my legs looked different the week before something than they did on an ordinary Tuesday, a thing I had noticed for years and never had an explanation for. None of that is on the surface of your skin. So every bottle I had ever bought had been sitting on top of a floor it could not get through. Not because I used it wrong. Not because I was inconsistent. Because a cream works on the layer a cream can reach, and the bands are three layers below it. Then she said the thing about the cups, which is the part I have thought about most since. A cup does something real. It lifts the skin off the bands. That is genuinely the right idea, and it is exactly why cupping *feels* like it should work. But you squeeze it on cold, so the tissue never softened. And it holds for about a minute and then it lets go. A cup does one third of the job. Cold. For ninety seconds. Eleven years of being extremely disciplined about things that were each doing a fraction of what needed doing, on a layer where the problem is not. I did not order anything that day. I am not an impulsive buyer and I have been wrong about this too many times. I spent the next four days reading. Not shopping — reading. I wanted to know whether what Maya told me was a real thing or a thing somebody had told her. I read about fibrous septae, which is the actual term, until my eyes hurt. I read a paper about why topical products cannot reach the relevant depth, which I understood about sixty percent of. I read a long thread of women who had done the clinic route and stopped for exactly the reason we stopped. I also read the angry reviews, because I always read the angry reviews first. Most of them were people who had used a device on the highest setting on the first night and bruised themselves. Which, if I am honest with you, sounded exactly like something I would do. Then I tried to actually choose one, and I nearly gave up right there. There are a lot of these things and most of them are junk. Cheap plastic cups with a motor in them. No heat. No control. No instructions worth reading. I put three different ones in a basket and closed the tab three different times over two days. What finally made me do it was the guarantee. A hundred days. Not thirty, where you have barely started. A hundred, which is long enough to actually find out. Fifty-nine dollars. Free shipping. I ordered it on a Tuesday night. And then it sat on my kitchen counter, in the box, for four days. Because somewhere between the confirmation email and the delivery, the familiar feeling came back. The one that arrives after the hope and before the disappointment. The one that says: you have been here before, you know exactly how this ends, and you are going to feel stupid again. Maya called on the Saturday and asked if I had started. I said not yet. She said start tonight. And then she said the thing that mattered more than anything else she told me. "Start on Level One. Do not go up. I know you, and I know you are going to want to." She was right. It has five levels and every instinct I have says the top one must work fastest. She said the programme says the same thing — Level One for the first two weeks — and that the women who ignore it bruise themselves, lose four days, and quit in week two convinced it does not work. More suction is not more result. The technique is the result. Slow strokes, always upward toward the hip, always with oil, ten minutes. So I sat on the floor of my bedroom on a Saturday night with a towel and a bottle of oil I already had, and I did it properly. And I will tell you the honest thing about that first night, which is that I could feel it working. Not in the vague way a cream is warm for a minute and then it is over. The head warms the skin first, and then the suction draws it up, and there is something moving underneath that has not moved in a long time. It is not gentle. It is also not painful. It is controlled, and you are the one deciding the level. It was the first time in eleven years that something I bought had done anything at all that I could physically detect. I took a photo that night. Bathroom, standing the same way, same light. I hated the photo. I saved it anyway. Week one: nothing. Week two: nothing I could see. I nearly stopped. I want to say that plainly, because when you have been disappointed this many times, two weeks of nothing feels exactly like the opening of the same old story. What kept me going was Maya, and ninety-three days left on the guarantee, and a fairly stubborn refusal to be the woman who quit at week two. Around week three my jeans went on differently over the tops of my thighs. Not looser — I want to be precise. The fabric moved over the back of my thigh in a way it had not for years. I had not lost any weight. Nothing else about them had changed. I did not think much of it at the time. It was only that night, lying in bed, that it occurred to me I had noticed something. Week four I took the second photo. Same bathroom, same spot on the tile, same light, standing the same way. I put the two of them side by side on my phone and sat down on the edge of the bath and looked at them for about ten minutes. Softer. Not gone. Softer, and clearly enough that I could have shown it to somebody. Eleven years of no evidence whatsoever, and suddenly two photographs. I sent them both to Maya. She wrote back one word. Week six is the one I actually think about. Ellie had a friend over and they were doing something on the living room floor, and I sat down cross-legged next to them in shorts to look at it, and I stayed there about twenty minutes, and I did not think about it once until I was standing back up. Week eight was the second Saturday in June, at my sister's place in Naperville. The kids had been in the pool since eleven. I was on the patio with a coffee, in shorts, with a towel over my arm out of habit. Beckett came running up the steps absolutely soaked, dripping all over the flagstones, and he said, "Mom, come in." And I said, "Okay." He did not react. He did not stop and stare at me. He said "okay!" and ran back and jumped in, because to an eight-year-old that is a completely ordinary thing for his mother to say. I put the coffee down. I left the towel on the chair. I walked down the steps and I got in the pool. I stayed in it for about two hours. He wanted to show me a handstand. He did eleven of them. I stood in the shallow end in the middle of the afternoon with my sister's neighbours on the other side of the fence, and I counted eleven handstands and told him the last one was the best, which it was not, but it was the eleventh. At no point in those two hours did I think about the backs of my legs. That is the whole thing. That is what I have to report. Not a transformation. Not a before and after. A Saturday afternoon in June where the subject did not come up inside my own head. I want to be honest with you now. I do not know what this does for everybody. I am not a doctor and I am not going to sit here and promise it will do for you what it did for me. My legs are not perfect. There is still texture there. If you put a hard light on them at two in the afternoon, you would see it. What I can tell you is that I spent eleven years believing this was permanent information about who I was, and about eight of those years quietly making my own life smaller because of it, and that neither of those things turned out to be necessary. In their study of a hundred women, 94% reported visibly smoother skin after the first use, 93% noticed less puffiness and fluid within thirty days, and 91% said their skin felt firmer with consistent use. Numbers like that used to slide straight off me. They mean something now that I understand which layer they are describing. I use it three nights a week. Ten minutes on the couch while I watch something. I am on Level Three now, which took me a month to work up to, and I have never once bruised. We are going to the dunes in August. Mark suggested it. He did not make anything of it and neither did I. The towel is still in the trunk of my car. I keep meaning to take it out and I keep not doing it. I think I want it there a while longer. If you have been sitting under one, here is the part it took me eleven years to work out. It was not your discipline. Mine was fine. Six months of dry brushing at six in the morning is not a woman who does not try. Every single thing I bought was one piece of a three-piece job, aimed at a layer where the problem is not. Fifty-nine dollars. One time. Free shipping. Nothing to refill, no subscription, no oil you have to buy from them — you use any oil you already own and charge it with a cable you already have. A hundred days to try it. If it does nothing for you, you send it back and they refund you. No forms, no questions. Take the day-one photograph before you start. Same spot, same light. In four weeks you will either have proof or you will have a refund, and both of those are better than another summer in the back row. Aubrey Hayes, 38, Chicago. dermaqlabs.com/sale *P.S. Maya is not paid by anybody and neither am I. She is a woman who has known me since I was 24 and who was willing to say "mine used to be worse than yours" out loud on a sun lounger, which is the single kindest thing anyone has done about this in eleven years. If you have a Maya, call her. If you do not, let this be her.* *P.P.S. If you take one thing from all of this, take the boring part. Level One for the first two weeks. I know precisely how much you are going to want to turn it up, because I wanted to turn it up on the first night. The women who turn it up bruise themselves, lose four days, and quit at week two with a story about how it did not work. That is the entire difference between having two photographs at week four and having another year of guessing.* *P.P.P.S. Beckett asked me last week whether we could go back to the pool club before school starts. I said yes. He asked if I was going to swim this time and I said yes, and he said "cool" and went back to what he was doing, because he is eight, and to him it was never a big thing at all.