Page 3 of Must Be Love - Irresistible Bachelors

“Hey, what’s that?” Nicole asks. She points to a booth to our left with an unfamiliar sign. “Blake Cosmeceuticals? I’ve never heard of them.”

I search my brain for the name but come up short. For work, Nicole and I have to stay on top of all these other brands. We’re industry professionals, and we’re members of all the insider groups. It’s rare we come across a company we don’t recognize.

“Let’s go check them out,” I suggest.

Nicole agrees and starts walking toward the booth.

Heads turn to watch her as she walks. It happens no matter where we go. While I’m short, curvy, and brunette, Nicole is tall, thin, and blonde. Sometimes, I wish I looked like her, but I don’t. And I’ve learned to accept my body the way it is.

The Blake Cosmeceuticals booth has a simple display. There’s a blue tablecloth set over three tables, and their products are set out by use. It’s not flashy, but I guess it gets the job done. I could teach them a thing or two about a setup that might garner more business, but I don’t give my services out for free.

I pick up one of the bottles. It’s a serum for acne. The ingredients seem normal, based on the others I’ve seen.

The next bottle I pick up is a moisturizer. I squirt some onto my hand to test it. It immediately smooths out the cracks in my skin from the cool New York fall weather.

“Check this out, Nic. Feel!”

I hold up my hand for her, and she runs her fingers over the spot I just moisturized.

“Wow, that’s nice. Let me see!”

While Nicole moisturizes her hands, I move on to the other sunblocks, moisturizers, and lotions that the company produces. There’s a young woman taking care of a customer on the other side of the booth. She greeted us when we first arrived, but the paying customer definitely takes priority. I get that. I used to earn some extra cash by working at booths for various companies during my undergrad, and I would have done the same thing.

I run my fingers over the different products this company is selling and providing for samples. They have a large range for a company I’ve never heard of. I wonder how long they’ve been in business. They must just work under the radar, selling directly to stores and keeping themselves out of the public eye. I’m not sure why. This company has me quite curious.

I get to the end of the booth where there’s more of a miscellany of products. The label here reads “healing and nourishing.”

This is exactly what I need. My hand goes to my face. When I was in my teens, I did a lot of tanning.

I grew up in Toms River, New Jersey, which is just across the way from Seaside Heights, where the MTV show Jersey Shore was filmed. That show may have been exaggerated for dramatic purposes, but it wasn’t very far off from the kinds of people I knew when I was a teenager.

All the high schoolers in Toms River went tanning. If you weren’t basically orange during the school year, you were an outcast.

Of course, we couldn’t lie out in the sun like normal people would. Toms River is right on the water. It would’ve been too easy to go to the beach regularly to get a natural tan. Instead, all the teens, me included, would go to tanning salons.

We were a lot like the cast of Jersey Shore, honestly. I had a huge bump in my hair for most of high school. My friends did, too. I’m glad I grew out of that phase before I started getting lip injections and plastic surgery. Most of the girls I knew as a teen look like they’re ninety percent fake now.

I shiver. I love where I grew up, but it totally ruined my skin. My face doesn’t look bad now. I haven’t been in a tanning booth since right before senior prom. What was once dark and wrinkly is now smooth and milky.

But while my skin may look good on the surface, I’m fairly sure there’s cellular damage. I can feel it. I’m not going to age well.

“Stop freaking out,” Nicole says.

I didn’t realize I was still stroking my face. “I’m not freaking out.”

She fixes me with a stern look. “You are. I can see you freaking out. Your skin is fine.”

Nicole and I have had this conversation many times over the years. She claims that because I don’t have any visible damage, I must be fine. Nicole doesn’t understand the countless hours I’ve put into researching what tanning can do to your skin.

I was in a tanning bed at least once a week, sometimes twice a week during the winter. That kind of damage doesn’t just disappear because you want it to.

---