Drink water, wash your face everyday, get enough sleep, and remove stress from your life and you’ll get clear skin! Guaranteed! Oh that doesn’t work? Try buying my product! “why is acne so strange?” is a piece written that attempts to question the social standard of clear skin. Join us while we unpack beauty expectations imposed on us by greedy capitalists, and dive deep on why we believe that having acne is an ODDITY.

thumbnail by: Pete Devito

Thanatos, death incarnate, sits with an arrow poised to his neck.

The moment we are born, various labels are immediately stuck onto us, both by people whom we care for and not. But not all those labels will stick, and then we’d be called the odd one. Yet, what is so odd about being our true selves?

Are the things we call odd, actually odd, or do they look odd? Growing up on “spot the difference” activities I think has trained me to associate “oddity” so heavily with physical representations of the word, like physical features or clothing. And consequently disregard our interests and personal experiences which make up our oddities just as much. So, here’s a recreation of the childhood activity, but with a twist, could you find the difference?

Reminisce is about finding joy once more in the things you cherished in your youth, no matter how “odd” or “weird” it was. It’s reclaiming the peculiarity you felt at 13. The fire of your obsession over a certain piece of media in the past is reignited, now with a feeling of fondness and nostalgia. It’s holding your 13-year old self and telling her it’s alright to like things other people don’t.

It is time for us to unleash our stories, wisdom, and magic as a woman, or rather, as a witch. We’ve suffered enough and it is time for us to fight back. Let us all embrace our oddity and continue to resist the patriarchy.

We are all unique, yet we are intertwined through our culture. Culture is the most important factor in determining the norm. This culture sets a standard for us, and refusing to follow this standard seems to invoke a primal feeling of guilt and doubt in ourselves.

Having oddity is not a bad thing, it's about changing our perspective within the society.

Theme Brief for Issue 2 in October 2020!