I owe you guys a beauty feature from last week. I had to do an emergency rant and interrupt our regularly scheduled programming. Here’s your beauty fix:

Spring and summer are coming, despite that fact that some of you may still (!) see snow when you look out the window. Warm weather means flashing sleeveless arms, lots of leg, and sandals. But if your elbows, knees and parts of your feet are 20 shades darker than your brown-hued skin, you’d better start taking care of it like…yesterday. ‘Elephant skin’ at the joints knocks off sexy points. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there’s new skincare technology that will work a lot better than a tub of Vaseline.

What’s ‘elephant skin’ anyway? “Skin on the knees and elbows tends to have a thicker dead layer of epidermis, called the stratum corneum. This is especially true if we constantly rub our elbows on the elbow rests of a chair or rub our knees from kneeling. The act of rubbing our knees and elbows also stimulates overproduction of melanin. Overproduction of melanin, combined with a thicker dead layer of epidermis, makes skin on the knees and elbows appear to be darker as it contains more melanin than skin in most other parts of the body,” says Dr. Felipe Jimenez, who has a Ph.D. in biochemistry.

Read the rest here.