a guide to microNOdling

don't do it yourself

May 23, 2024

Microneedling: an anti-ageing treatment where you pay someone to lightly irritate your skin with needles in order to create more collagen.

MicroNOdling: when a fully qualified friend regularly performs this procedure while charging you mate’s rates and letting her small white dog sit on your lap, but then you decide to have a go yourself because 17-year-old Tiktokkers implied it was ‘super easy’. The ‘no’ in microNOdling is to be screamed so loudly that deep fissures appear in the nearest wall.

Follow these instructions closely:

Buy the exact equipment and products your qualified friend uses, but with crucial omissions such as ‘aftercare moisturiser’ because, when pushed, you believe aftercare (such as 100% Aloe Vera gel or La Roche Posay Cicaplast Baum) is for weak-ass bitches. The equipment includes something called Dr Pen which is the main apparatus you will use on your face. You feel you are in safe hands because, even though they’re your hands, and your hands have never performed this procedure, the pen is a doctor.
Make a note of the exact needle length for each section of your face, because Dr Pen contains 32 needles that jab in and out at around a million times per second. You can control the length of the needle using the interface on Dr Pen, and if you get it wrong then it’s unclear what will occur. Anyway, back to doing this yourself with no qualifications or prior experience.
When everything arrives, charge Dr Pen and cleanse your face. Use an entire tube of numbing cream. Get a tiny bit of numbing cream in your mouth and google ‘Is licodine poisonous if I swallow it’ and be unable to get an answer because everything appears to be written by ChatGPT on a website called Doctoring Medicine Health Times because the internet is dead.
Read on the Dr Pen official tutorial that if there is any numbing cream left on your face once you have begun the procedure, you will inadvertently inject licodine into yourself. But what cleanser should you use to cleanse said numbing cream off yourself? According to the website, a gentle alcohol-based cleanser. Well, you’ve got the 70% alcohol solution you used to sterilise the equipment, so maybe mix that with some water to dilute it. This will feel like a bad idea, but also like you’re an apothecarist, so don’t question it.
Cleanse your face with the solution.
Using Dr Pen, carefully microneedle the solution directly into your face and give yourself a chemical burn. Turns out it was a bad idea, and you are not an apothecarist.
Do not notice this has happened because you’ve realised you forgot to slather Hyalalalllllalalaauronic acid on while needling your forehead. It’s crucial to lubricate the needles with serum and now your head is covered in welts.
Convince yourself this is okay, even though the skin around your mouth is turning purple, and your forehead looks sandpapered.
Consider the fact that aftercare (such as 100% Aloe Vera gel or La Roche Posay Cicaplast Baum) is not for weakass bitches. Still do not buy either of these things because this is okay (see point 8). Put lots of hyalrlrlalallaonic acid on and go to sleep.

The next day wake up and, when your partner says ‘Good morning The Joker’.
Send a whatsapp to your expert friend (with the mate’s rates and the small white dog) who says she’s never seen anything like this before. Google ‘red marks microneedling’, ‘huge big painless purple mark on face microneedling’ and ‘microneedling gone wrong’ but none of the pictures resemble your chin. The pictures do, however, resemble your forehead, so relax about that. Also, nobody is looking at your forehead because of your gigantic purple clown chin (GPCC).
Do not reschedule the filmed podcast you are recording to look after your GPCC, even though it’s your podcast, and this is the only perk of being your own boss. Instead, push through, slathering on a heavily perfumed SPF, and some makeup. You’ve never worn makeup after microneedling, even when it’s gone well. Nobody wears makeup after microneedling; it’s the one rule. But in this case, you definitely should.
At 2pm, your podcast co-host will ask if you are allergic to your own hat. An hour later, you will quietly shed a layer of skin like Goldmember (contemporary reference). You see an Instagram reel where a woman has a chemical burn after microneedling, and she says if you can’t feel your face, then it’s a third degree burn. You can’t feel your face. You consider calling 111.
Instead, go to your friend’s house and drink a bottle of wine. It’s important you don’t skip this step, because alcohol makes any facial rashes or burns look much worse, bringing all the blood to the surface.
Wake up at 5am the next morning in your friend’s spare bedroom, so thirsty you can’t swallow. Look in her bathroom mirror, and start hyperventilating.
Call 111 and get told to go to A&E. Feel free to ask whether you can wait and go to the A&E near your own house, 62 miles away, but be told no, you have to go to the one in Lewisham within the hour. Now - listen very closely - it’s important that you wait in the waiting room for three hours before finally seeing the doctor who tells you they don’t have a burns unit in that particular hospital and it would have been much better to go to the hospital near your house, 62 miles away. That is crucial.
Doctoring Medicine Health Times advises you that ‘microneedling is a great way to treat burn scars’.
On the train home, eat a box of raw tempeh. You don’t remember buying the tempeh, you never eat tempeh, but apparently after you drank the bottle of wine at your friend’s house, you went to a deli and bought raw tempeh. It tastes like solidified grouting.
Remember you pay £40 a month to Vitality - the health thing with that sausage dog? You signed up during the doctors/nurses/ambulance strikes in case you broke your leg and couldn’t get an ambulance, before later finding out Vitality don’t cover ambulances or even emergencies; if anything happens you’d have to wait for an NHS ambulance and go to a normal NHS accident and emergency department anyway, so you keep meaning to cancel but for some reason are scared of fully submitting to a health system that doesn’t work, and maybe they’ll start doing ambulances or something?! Anyway, you make a GP zoom appointment for the next morning. You’ve paid Vitality £40 a month for a year and this is your first time using the service, which feels steep, but you would currently pay £1000 for a doctor to tell you anything other than ‘we don’t have a burns unit’.
The sausage dog doctor says it will be alright. It’s a first degree burn, you just need to avoid sunlight or makeup, and put gentle aloe vera gel and vaseline on it. Buy these things from Boots and sit in the bedroom with the blinds down.
Have a deep existential crisis about why you submitted to capitalist notions of ageing as correctional, and that this correction should be made by spending £200 on something called ‘Dr Pen’. Hate your vanity. Reason with yourself that your profession is different to other professions, and that you won’t get any TV work if you look older because society fears visible older women. Counter your own argument with the fact that you don’t get much TV work as it is, and there are loads of older women on TV. Claudia Winkleman, for example. You also got even less TV work in your 20s, when your face was as smooth as a kitchen counter. And didn’t you want to move into writing instead, in case TV work made you too obsessed about your appearance? Isn’t that why you started a substack? So you could perhaps become a novelist or something? Think about how, instead of writing the great American novel, you are writing about how you injected alcohol into your chin in an attempt to look younger. Sink into further depths.
Try to return Dr Pen (who you now cleverly refer to as Dr Shit) but obviously discover you can’t, because it is gummed up with half your face, so that’s £200 down the gritter (toilet).
Commit to never, ever doing this again. Ask your partner to physically stop you if you try. He says ‘Okay The Joker’.
Keep Dr Shit just in case your professional friend (safe, cheap, small white dog) goes on holiday or something and you’ve got some acting work coming up.