stupid little trivia piece on scars

[burntcopper]

One place I can guarantee you nearly every single woman in the north-west hemisphere, Japan and Australia has scars. Which they will never have thought of. And never, ever get counted as in those stupid 'scar tally-up' conversations everyone gets into at some point or another.

No, we're not talking TB vaccinations. Those are mostly Brits, and how I realised the L'Enfant poster that was so popular in the 80s was using a a British model. It's also cross-gender.

Nor are we talking burns from cookery.

Or stretch marks you get from your hips/tits growing faster than your skin has time to catch up with at puberty.

Give up?

BACK OF THE ANKLES.

From wearing shoes. We've all had blisters from straps, new shoes, trainers after running for ages - you get blisters, they bleed, you put on a plaster, the skin heals. Only it's not just once in your life. It's regularly. Often it's once a year. That skin scars. Scars by their definition are where the new skin hasn't merged in seamlessly with the old. And this skin has been cut over and over again. Every single woman I saw on the tube tonight had scars from shoes on the back of their ankles. Some it was a faint mark, some it was pretty obvious. But all of them had it.

So if anyone ever tells you they have no scars and're female? They lie, my children, they lie. The only way you can get away with not having them is if you've gone barefoot or only worn flip-flops your entire life. Not sandals. Flip-flops. You have a strap going round your ankles, that strap will rub and cause blisters at some point.

This random piece of trivia brought to you by going up the stairs and going 'huh, what's the mark on the back of everyone's ankles?' this morning.

Comments

[sakara75.livejournal.com]

i dont have scars on the backs of my ankles...then again it takes a lot for me to scar.(try a brick into the knee..thatll do it...but losing the entire skin of the back of my knee-nope, slcing open my finger - nope) but yeah most womens feet are a sorryt state
that saying ive seen women with scars between their big and second toe from wearing flipflops..and those rubbing raw the skin

[burntcopper.livejournal.com]

really? scars from flip flops between the toes? huh. Learn something new every day - I've been wearing flip flops since I could walk.

(my scars, aside from the ankles, are mostly from pretty deep ones or thin skin - barbed wire, gun turrets, tarmac applied to elbows and knees, teeth braces, etc)

[odangochan.livejournal.com]

I thought it was just me, that that area above the heel was abnormally straight on me and that's why I always ended up scarred/blistered there! Women's shoes have a nasty tendency to curve inwards at the top in that area

[burntcopper.livejournal.com]

Not just womens' shoes. the Doc Martens shoes do too.

[cynicalcylon.livejournal.com]

It's also a common place for shaving-related scars.

[jamjar.livejournal.com]

No scars on my feet, other than when my little toe was crunched between two floorboards. My mum had a real thing about kids' shoes: round toes, never pointed, no slip-ons (bad for the feet), proper room to grow, etc. and that stuck with me.

Cooking scars-- one of my fingers has a scar on the side and another on the tip, two separate times that I sliced it off peeling or cutting potatoes. I usually have at least one burn mark going at a time, but then they fade away.

The thing with burn scars like that is that the more you get them, the less you get them-- your body becomes desensitised and stops reacting to them, so you don't blister or scar as much.

[burntcopper.livejournal.com]

Really? All my ankle scars are from the sensible shoes. the ridiculously high heeled wedges and sandals I've been known to wear - not a sausage in the way of blisters.

All my trainers invariably get blood stains on the backs, my DMs (fully approved by mother dearest, advocate and lead spokesperson for sensible shoes with very wide toes and good grip) at school gave me ankle blisters, and the world's most sensible walking sandals gave me blisters after walking in them for several hours.

[jamjar.livejournal.com]

The other thing I do is put on pre-blister plasters before I wear anything the first few times. Fabric plasters are so useful- especially when your trainers start to wear away on the inside at the heel. Just a square of fabric plaster there, and it stops the rubbing.

[gerriparker.livejournal.com]

your body becomes desensitised and stops reacting to them, so you don't blister or scar as much.

Ooo I didn't know that. I have a corker of a scar acros the back of my hand from brushing it against teh oven shelf while removing a pizza (Wasn't even my bloody pizza either) but now I ocme to think of it I've done the same sort of thing since and not left as bad a mark as that one did.

[jamjar.livejournal.com]

My brother's a cook. He used to do stuff when he got burnt- butter, cling film over the top and hold it to get it back to body temperature (water cools it down, so helps take away the pain, but is a greater shock to the burn)- but after a while, he just stopped needing to do anything, which was very useful for him.

[gerriparker.livejournal.com]

Bizarrely I'm rarely troubled by ankle straps and I don't wear court shoes without tights of opop socks (another common source of back of the ankle scarring) Where i do have nasty foot scars is on the sides of my feet just before the you get to the sole where my feet rub against any type of flip flop or sandal because I have wide flat feet The top of my foot about an inch above the second toe also suffers for teh same reason.

But I totally agree about the 'forgetting' bit and never counting those as scars

[foblivio.livejournal.com]

I don't really wear heels all that much. However I do wear flipflops in the summer, and that's where I get my scars. In fact, as it's summer right now, my tender feet from winter now bear the painful bright red scars from breaking in those flipflops. But yes, it is sad the cross we women bare.

PS never heard of bandages being called plaster. Awesome. I'm so using that word now XD

[burntcopper.livejournal.com]

really? standard name for them in the UK. plasters for the little skin-coloured things, Elastoplasts being the equivalent of Band-aids.

[foblivio.livejournal.com]

Why say bandaids, when you could say elastoplasts?

I also like how a torch is a flashlight. Awesome!

*Canadian by the way*

[aderyn.livejournal.com]

Oooh, hello freaky brain twin! I was thinking very similar thoughts this weekend when I foolishly chose to break in my new shoes on a shopping trip to London. While popping on plasters on the train, I was looking around and realising that most women do indeed have some kind of marking there, and feeling glad that I wasn't alone in my foolishness!

[andromakie.livejournal.com]

Huh, that's about the one place where I *don't* have scars! I guess my policy of no heels + comfortable shoes at all times + expensive shoes for the most part pays off. I have never had a blister on the back of my ankle, even though my feet are shaped badly for shoes. Now I know why I'm so paranoid about my shoes fitting properly.