Keratosis Pilaris (Chicken Skin)

You run your hand over your upper arms and feel them: small, rough bumps, like fine sand beneath the skin. Hundreds of tiny keratin plugs forming around the hair follicles — on the upper arms, the thighs, sometimes the cheeks. Medically, keratosis pilaris is a harmless keratinisation disorder. The skin produces too much keratin, the protein blocks the follicle openings, and what emerges are these small, stubborn spots that can be shifted neither by creams nor by scrubs in any lasting way.

Psychosomatically, a different question arises — one that goes deeper than the horny layer: what is trying to break through to the outside, and why is it blocked over and over again? Why does your body form, at precisely the places where force and drive reside — the upper arms, the thighs — a kind of barricade of tiny cones?