Cellulitis

The skin on your thighs, your buttocks, your hips is changing its surface. Dimples form, unevenness, a texture colloquially called orange peel skin. The connective tissue loses its uniformity. Fat cells push through the collagen fibres upward, the tissue becomes uneven, the skin looks as if it has lost its smoothness.

Dermatology views cellulitis as a structural change in the subcutaneous fatty tissue — hormonally influenced, genetically co-determined, more common in women than in men. All of that is true. But BodySignal asks further: What shows itself in a body that changes its surface? What does a tissue express when it contracts, forms dimples, appears uneven — as if something from within is pressing outward but is not being let through?

Cellulitis is not a flaw, but a mirror.