Why do young people wear stickers on their faces?

Do not be alarmed if you come across teenagers on the street wearing stickers the size of a dot on their faces. Your vision is not failing you, nor are you having a vitreous detachment. It is, quite simply, a trend that has spread among young people after the American brand Starface began marketing them. The reason? Treating pimples withacneand with hydrocolloid patches that absorb the liquid and protect them. But if until recently many of these patches were marketed in beige tones, with the desire to go unnoticed, now some young people have decided to do just the opposite: turn the pimple into an ornamental pretext. The patches are sold in bright colors – even fluorescent ones – and take the form of stars, moons, hearts, emojis, panda bears, avocados, or ghosts, in addition to reproducing fictional characters. Celebrities like Justin Bieber and North West, with her mother, Kim Kardashian, have joined this trend. But, as often happens with contemporary trends, not everything is new under the sun: behind these apparently innovative stickers hides a much older gesture.

In Ancient Rome, Ovid, in theArs amatoria (III, 202), already mentioned the use of patches with preparations for the face for cosmetic purposes. Martial, in the Epigrams, it also cites a woman who wore one in the shape of a half moon on her forehead, as well as a slave who, after being freed, used them to hide the letters that had identified him as such. The English play Westward Ho, written in 1604 by Thomas Dekker and John Webster, also mentions patches adhered with a resinous substance called mastic which, when placed on the temples –between the eyes and the ears–, served both a therapeutic and beautifying function.

But if there is a trend with direct communicating vessels to current stickers, it is the mouches (from the French, flies): one of the most curious fashions of the 17th and 18th centuries. They consisted of small pieces of black fabric – silk taffeta, velvet, or even paper – that were stuck to the skin of the face, neck, and occasionally the chest or neckline. The adhesive element was a sticky substance that, at times, could also contain a medicinal preparation to be applied over a lesion. Although geometric shapes were the most common, there were also hearts, moons, and stars, and even silhouettes of carriages with horses or ships. The mouches also functioned as part of a broader cosmetic set. During the 17th and 18th centuries, especially in court circles, white preparations were used to lighten the face, as a clear indicator of social distinction. The black mouches added contrast and accentuated the artificially whitened skin. Furthermore, depending on the placement of the mouches, they could adopt different meanings in the art of seduction, in a court life where it was more important to know how to insinuate than to speak.

The mouches were kept in luxurious little boxes made of porcelain, silver, or gold – with a special compartment for the sticky paste – which were given as gifts to express admiration or romantic affection. A practice that can be mirrored in the current one, in which young people exchange patches as they did when they were little with Pokémon cards, to get that special sticker that helps them gain points in the market of adolescent distinction.

This fashion went into decline at the end of the 18th century, in a context in which the French Revolution contributed to questioning ostentation, also in makeup, and favored a more austere aesthetic. In parallel, the smallpox vaccine, introduced at the end of the century, could have reduced the need to hide the scars. Today a pimple can be worn like a star, but that does not mean we have learned to accept our body better. Anyone with extensive acnee will hardly find reasons to celebrate it. Even imperfection has a limit: what separates the accessory from the stigma.