I stopped hiding it and started making art with it
Ariana has had reactive, blushing skin for as long as she can remember. At some point the marks stopped being something to cover up.
Ariana Page Russell ·
- Living with it
- More than 10 years
- Main trigger
- Scratching and pressure
- What helped
- Making art with it, and treating it as part of her rather than a flaw
I don't know when I got dermatographia. I've had it for as long as I can remember.
My skin blushes, welts and reacts to almost everything. For a long time that felt like something to hide — the flushing, the raised lines, the marks that appear whenever anyone touches me or I touch myself.
At some point I stopped hiding it and started photographing it. I draw and write on my skin, and my skin answers back in raised lines that last twenty or thirty minutes before fading. Then I photograph them. My skin became the material, which turned the thing I was most self-conscious about into the thing my work is built on.
That shift changed how it feels to live with. It's still itchy. It still reacts. But it stopped being a defect and became a characteristic — something my body does, not something wrong with me.
Not everyone is going to make art out of theirs, and that's fine. But I do think there's something in refusing to treat your own skin as an embarrassment. Mine is sensitive, expressive and a bit dramatic. So am I.