Skin Deep: The Inside Story of Our Outer Selves
Phillipa McGuinness
Vintage, $34.99
Those of us who’ve worked with mainstream media photographers soon learn that “Black people are hard to photograph”. Since film’s invention, racial bias was embodied in its emulsions and processing, both formulated to depict shades of pale skin. Later, this bias was encoded in digital camera designs, algorithmically geared against darker-toned skin, which required “special” lighting and colour-adjustment “compensation”.
Our skin signals many internal health conditions, but there are only 550 practising dermatologists in Australia.Credit:Andrew Quilty
Light skin remains the default focus of digital media production. Only in the past year has Google announced plans to tweak its auto-white exposure balance to improve clarity of darker skin tones in its products.
I was reminded of this when reading Phillipa McGuinness’ Skin Deep, in which she describes how “my white skin shields me like an invisibility cloak … This privilege, this lack of otherness, declutters my headspace.”
Yet she becomes “rueful and wistful” when scanned for skin cancers by dermatologist Dr Ming. Sympathising with a patient who calls himself “a White man in a Black man’s country”, McGuinness ponders: “I don’t really think I was born in the wrong country. Is it an abrogation of responsibility to imply that whatever Dr Ming might find, it’s not my fault? Not my fault that I inherited the white skin of my ancestors, unpigmented by rainy, cool climes with gentle sunlight. Like a self-pitying teenager, am I whining that I didn’t choose to be descended from pale settlers who colonised a ferociously sunny distant land? Not my fault that I grew up in a beachside suburb before the Slip! Slop! Slap! Public health mantra transformed our behaviour.”
Such musings make it difficult to imagine Skin Deep’s intended readership. Writing during a pandemic is challenging – the book’s interviews are largely via Zoom or email; much of it summarises other books, films and memories. Skin is considered through cultural and scientific lenses, though this isn’t a monograph in the interrogative style of (say) Bri Lee or Jess Hill. McGuinness is over-present in the text (alongside family and friends), and digressive musings read like weekend magazine columns.
Phillipa McGuinness describes skin conditions with compassion in Skin Deep.Credit:Mel Koutchavlis
Nor is Skin Deep crafted with the erudite rigour of science authors such as Margaret Wertheim or Lizzie O’Shea. To demonstrate how nerve endings work, McGuinness writes: “If you touch your hair, you feel it on your hands, but the hair itself has no sensation. If a hairdresser is poised to snip off a lock they’re holding between their fingers, you don’t really feel it, although even with your eyes closed you know they are touching your hair. If they yank the strand and stimulate the nerves on your scalp, then you will certainly know.”
And: “A desired kiss will leave no mark, if it’s done right, but a violent strike will leave a bruise, or worse, visible to the world and felt deeply within.” Padded with such laboured banalities, the book doesn’t extend these into (for instance) discussion about the mechanisms by which bruising manifests; nor about the cutaneous reach of nerve-endings.
Still, Skin Deep describes skin conditions and their sufferers with compassion, and it skilfully documents tensions between cosmetic and medical dermatology. Incredibly, although our skin signals many internal health conditions, there are only 550 practising dermatologists in Australia. “That’s about one for every 46,000 people.” Systemic problems of skin cancer clinics, many of which “reach for their scalpels first and ask questions later”, are mapped.
Ranging across topics from Botox to tattoos to Australian racism, McGuinness writes: “I want to see beyond my White force field, but will not channel my energy into guilty hand-wringing or crying White tears … better to act to make change.”
The afflictions Skin Deep discusses – melanoma, eczema, psoriasis, acne, blushing, cosmetic surgery – are largely well-researched white concerns. Common skin concerns burdening First Nations Australians – including scabies and impetigo – aren’t discussed, though the latter affects nearly half of Australia’s remote Indigenous children. Nor is there mention of Australia’s substantial canon of millennia-old skin medicines – witjuti for burns; eucalyptus, tea tree and mountain pepper for infections; Pycnoporus for thrush; Eremophila for sores; bracken and bayhops for bites, kangaroo apple for swelling.
Small discursive inclusions build change. As the book concludes: “… dismantling our perceptions … and our racist systems will take as many steps, big and small, as there are skin tones.”
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