The Vibrant Skin — On the False Fragility of the Marked Body

Friday, April 25, 2025

They called it weak.
Loose, damaged, stretched, disorganized.
They called it cellulite, striae, imperfections.
They taught women to conceal, erase, smooth out the surface —
as if memory should not be seen.
As if the skin was only valuable when it showed nothing.

But this was never fragility.
It was porosity.
A capacity to receive, to carry, to echo.
A skin that does not repel the world but allows it in —
and shows the traces.

Stretch marks are not wounds.
They are records of passage.
Not scars, but events inscribed.
They appear where something has moved through:
growth, force, tension, expansion, life.
They are the result of a rupture that was survived —
and integrated.

Cellulite is not a failure of containment.
It is density with memory.
The body remembers with water, with tissue, with texture.
These so-called “imperfections” are not aesthetic problems.
They are vibratory accumulations,
zones where resonance has concentrated.
They are geographies of experience — not disorders.

And the reason why women carry them more visibly
is not because they are fragile —
but because they are open.
Because their skin is thinner,
more alive,
more attuned to what moves beneath.
Because they are entrusted with transmission.

The culture of smoothness, the demand for erasure,
is nothing but a refusal of memory made visible.
A violence against the sacred role of the skin.
They do not want to see what the body has held —
because to see it
is to be accountable.

To reclaim these marks is not a self-love gesture.
It is an ethical stance.
It is a way of saying:
this body has hosted the real.
This body has bent and endured.
This body has remembered.

The skin is not a screen.
It is not for display.
It is a threshold.
A membrane that speaks the unspeakable.
And those who are marked
are not weak —
they are keepers of the passage.

Let the folds remain.
Let the dents remain.
Let the lines remain.
They are not flaws.
They are witnesses.

This is not the return of beauty.
This is the return of truth.