On Wrinkles

This picture this is cut from is a little messed up. In my defense, my reference was a mess. It's Tom. Oh course. He's smiling. He's twenty-eight now. He's getting little crinkles every where. I can honestly only make educated guesses as to where they are exactly, not having seen him up close with my own eyes.

Wrinkles happen where skin is repeated stressed. So when you look at this picture of Tom's eyes all crinkling up, you can kind of tell where the wrinkles are going to happen. Under the eyebags and down the cheeks.

Yesterday I was looking at my boyfriend's face and there was this crazy fucking eye crinkle running parallel to the pull of the zygomatic major (the smiling muscle).

Shown in figure 7: Not my boyfriend.
So, kind of right across that red line there.

Kinda like this. Except that I can't draw him from memory yet, so this is just a kinda generic eye... Actually, he is pretty generic. Enough of that. That's not the point.
The direction of the wrinkles and crinkles I would expect are marked in red. They make sense. Like gathering fabric, it's obvious the skin would fold there every time he smiled, or squinted or poofed his cheeks out. (The ones right under the eye make sense too. That's the squinting muscle action.) But why in the name of all things Pretty would there be a wrinkle running across the cheek like that?

I stared at him for literally a half an hour before I glanced at my hands and realized how obvious it was.



I forgot, there are two kinds of wrinkles. I call them folded and stretched wrinkles in my head. Because one, (A) happens by being squished all the time. Either by something like the bending of a finger, or the gathering of a smiling cheek. The skin folds in on itself. (B) The other happens because the skin gets stretched by some action. The cheeks ball up when one smiles, they have to stretch horizontally. So when that muscle action stops, the skin falls in on itself. It's like the reverse of the first kind. When the skin isn't being pulled out tight, and stretched, it falls in on itself. Like trying to put a king sized bedspread on a queen sized matress, yeah? There's extra material. And then a really big guy sleeps on it, and all the extra fabric gets pressed into permanent wrinkles. Or like the big guy himself. He's got some spare gut, and it folds into itself. See?

I have a theory that there might be a difference in shape and line quality between these two types. It certainly looks that way from looking at my knuckles (I left the photo all huge like so you can examine that if you like). But hand crinkles are there from birth, so that might be kind of different. I'm not sure.

If that is the case, the implications would be fantastic. It would mean having the ability to look at the different kind of wrinkles on a face and determine with far more accuracy, how and where it moves. Wow. That would be like Christmas in July good. Hopefully I can figure that one out.

I need to get a pair of dark glasses or something so I can stare at people without them seeing. ;)