A week after having a nickel-sized chunk of skin surgically removed from my forehead, I went to a party in lower Manhattan with a couple of BandAids stretched across my Aquaphor-slathered sutures. It was my first night out on the town since slicing the dome open, and my head and confidence were both still a bit tender. Unless you’re emulating early-2000s Nelly, adhesive bandages don’t get the same style pass as, say, Starface pimple patches. No matter how much I wished to evade attention, I knew I would have to address my forehead at some point during the night.
So when a friend finally pointed them out and asked me what was up, I told her I had some skin cancer removed—and then downplayed the severity of the condition because I’m reluctant to use the C word to conflate a cluster of mutated basal cells with much more serious types of cancer. Still, I didn’t expect what she said next: “Skin cancer? Damn, that must be embarrassing for someone in Dewy Dudes.”
If you’re a very online, skin care obsessive, chances are you’ve come across the memes my childhood friend Emilio Quezada-Ibañez and I cook up under the moniker Dewy Dudes—a skincare and wellness meme account-turned-podcast that breaks down what’s going on in the male beauty space. We skewer soft-boy toiletry status symbols while also sincerely engaging with them.
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From New Yorkers who bathe with moldy subscription-based showerhead filters to Bravo stars jumping out the Lyft wearing Dieux eye masks for their season reunion, no one is off limits from a little flambéing in our quest to keep up with the ever-changing beauty standards for men (except maybe our brand partners, especially if they’re reading this).
When we started the project around 2019, our aim was to convert scumbro dirtbags into skintellectual SPF addicts, one joke and product recommendation at a time. I certainly wasn’t parading around a glowy money-maker all the time, but at the core of the project was an us-versus-them subtext–a message of “this is what healthy skin looks like,” if you do x, y and z. And I thought I was a part of the in-group, so when my friend teased that I might feel embarrassed about my skin cancer, I wondered if my hesitation to use the C word might be less about stealing cancer survivor valor and more about feeling ashamed of the irony at play: How could someone whose whole schtick is goading dudes into sneaking a few squeezes of their girlfriend’s Unseen Sunscreen wind up with skin cancer?
Three years ago, the dermatologist first diagnosed a small spot on my forehead as basal cell carcinoma (BCC). He informed me it was the most common form of cancer, as well as the most treatable, rarely ever reaching metastasis. I had it surgically cured a month later with a surgery called Mohs, a technique where layers of skin are progressively removed and examined under a microscope until only cancer-free tissue remains, leaving me with a scar that has just now started to fade into my elevens. I was 27 at the time and didn’t think much of it. I thought maybe it was all just a fluke.
But at the end of this spring, when dermatologists diagnosed a new spot in the same area, I fell into a bout of depression, realizing I had officially joined the high-risk club for skin cancer. According to the Skin Cancer Foundation, if you’ve been diagnosed with a second BCC, you have a 61.5 percent chance of being a repeat patient within two years. I remember getting off the call with the bearer of bad biopsy news and imagining a future in which dozens of surgeries could leave me looking like Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky—not necessarily the ideal look for a guy who’s into skin care.
When I went in for my second Mohs surgery, the technician sternly remarked how I was too young to already be here, almost as if she were reprimanding me for my lack of SPF use. I wanted to show her a photo of my medicine cabinet full of PR-gifted sunscreen to show I already had that shit on lock, but getting in her good graces wouldn’t have changed why I was there.
Anyone familiar with the BCC knows it likely manifests as the result of sun damage at a young age in the genetically predisposed. That tracks, in my case. When I was in high school, long before Dewy Dudes, I worked at an outdoor pool as a lifeguard during 100-degree Kansas summers. I endured multiple severe burns while dismissing my mom’s pleas to quit for the sake of my pale, largely Irish skin.
But joining the high-risk group for skin cancer has only emboldened my skincare piety; it just takes on a different shade now. Health is suddenly more important than vanity. If I once dedicated all my attention to getting a glow off, fixing a clapped t-zone and minimizing the appearance of fine lines, I’m now conducting daily visual self-exams, sealing off the Mohs scars within silicone strips and triaging my sun exposure. My annual derm visits have been doubled, UPF workout gear has been copped, and supplements have been ordered—all with the knowledge that the odds of permanently preventing another BCC are against me.
During a moment in which sunscreen trutherism is permeating wellness culture, against the backdrop of record-high skin cancer rates around the world, I wonder if the online brain rot that’s pathologized anti-aging for TikTok teens will do some good—it could spare them the consequences I’m experiencing now from childhood sun exposure. I hope so. According to my Mohs technician, the youngest case she helped treat was eleven years old.