What I Learned from Dr. Pimple Popper

My wife covers her eyes or focuses on a game on her phone when we watch Dr. Pimple Popper, at least when a surgery starts. But she does like to watch the show with me, and she occasionally glances up even during the surgery. It’s hard to not be squeamish when the scalpel slices into the skin. You either turn away, or you feel as if you must watch. I’m sure someone has probably already has written books on the psychology of this. My wife is the “turn-away” sort, and I am the “must-watch” sort. (I am a horror novelist, after all… I also watch the needle going in when I donate blood or take a blood test.)

Cindy and I have watched as several people have lipomas (benign fatty tumors) and other undesirable things removed from beneath their skin. It’s both fascinating and gruesome. It’s also really cool when you see how someone’s life is changed for the better after some disfigurement is removed.

But I’ve learned something from watching the show. As the scalpel slices into the skin, I’ve noticed that the pigmented layer of the skin (the part that contains the external skin color) is very thin. It’s only 1mm to 4mm in thickness. For those of us who are metrically challenged, that’s between roughly 1/32 and 5/32 of an inch. That’s all. Underneath that extremely thin layer of pigmented skin, we all look alike.

So, can anyone tell me, objectively, why some people make such a fuss about something so thin? Why in the world would anyone give an airborne mass of fecal matter what color that thin layer of skin is?

Do you think that for even one second our Heavenly Father, the Father of the entire human race, makes the slightest distinction between His children based on something so trivial?