Sensitive skin

I took my first unaccompanied plane trip at the age of eight, from North Carolina to my grandmother's house near Albany, New York. It was because of this trip that my mother decided I was old enough to own a real, grown-up watch--in part because if I was grown up enough to travel by myself, I was grown up enough to take care of nice things, and in part because I wouldn't have anyone to tell me the time in the airplane.

My dad took me shopping to pick out my watch. I can picture the jewelry counter we stood at, and the lighting and layout of the store, but I'm not totally sure what store it was--possibly Wal-Mart. I was allowed to pick out any watch I wanted within a certain price range.

It was 1992, and watches like the Baby G hadn't quite caught on yet. With my always impeccable eight-year-old taste, I opted for a stylish watch much like a middle-aged woman might wear. It had an embossed leather strap, fake gold around the face, a rainbowy-hologram type face, and little fake crystals instead of numbers. I searched the internet in vain for a photo of a similar watch, but I did find one that demonstrated the basic structure:


Yeah. It was like that, except with the hologram thing and the crystals, like I said. Obviously the height of fashion for the third-grade set, except not at all. But I loved it, with a fiery burning passion that was, at the time, pretty much unequaled. My dad tolerantly agreed with me when I repeatedly insisted, "Isn't it SO PRETTY? Don't you LOVE IT?" and paid the cashier.

God damn, I was so proud of that watch. I kept it in its box until the day of my trip, reverently look at it several times each day. On the day of the plane flight, I put on the watch, and when I had to go through the metal detector at the airport, I was so proud that I got to take it off.

The day after I arrived at my grandmother's house, I woke up with my left wrist all itchy and covered in bumps. My grandmother said that it was probably poison ivy, so she slathered my wrist in calamine lotion and told me to wear my watch on my right hand so as not to irritate the rash any further. The next day, I woke up with the same rash all over my right wrist.

The doctor said that I was most likely allergic to nickel, a common allergy in kids that I might one day outgrow. The best way to tell for sure was to tape a nickel to my forearm and see if I developed a rash. I tried it, and the proof was there. Stainless steel has nickel in it, so from that point forward, I was relegated to only plastic things touching my skin.

My parents and I soon discovered that nickel touches your skin in the most unexpected ways. For instance, I would get rashes on my stomach where the back side of the button of my jeans pressed against my skin. We solved that problem by painting clear nail polish over the metal, but the watch had too much metal, including the little knob for setting the time, for that solution to work. My beautiful, stylish watch was relegated to a drawer, where I was never able to wear it again. And I cried. A lot. My parents took me to look for a plastic watch, and that was when we discovered that even plastic watches almost all have stainless steel backs. All except one, which I ended up being forced to get, more or less against my will. It looked like this:


It might have been more age-appropriate than my old-lady watch, but I hated it with as much intensity as I had loved the other watch. Even now, I can't stand Disney anything, or that particular shade of pink.

The doctor was right that the allergy would fade with time, but it never faded completely. I can only wear earrings for a few hours at a time, and if I wear a necklace on a humid day and sweat at all, I get a nasty rash on the back of my neck. So my preferred metals are gold and, of course, platinum. What can I say? Apparently, I have expensive taste, and my skin agrees.