Urea Vs. Bumps

So my evil plan, to develop some stratum corneum and hide the orange-rind-looking substructure of my skin, in a controlled way that doesn't prevent me from getting a good shave, is coming along nicely. I'm just changing elements of the "perfect" shave to make it ideal as a routine, and plan to keep with the Tech.  I saw the milky stratum beginning to subsume thinner, pore-dotted elevations today. This is two days after applying pumpkin juice at night, and one day after going back to Williams from Arko.

I mention the pumpkin juice because my recent bump-raising experience seemed to indicate a two-day delay between topical treatment and emergence of the stimulated skin cells as corneocytes. I could be wrong, I'll admit. This isn't exactly "science." But when I had some difficulty at the jaw corners, and felt the itch of bumps rising again today, I acted on my theories by applying carbamide on a cotton ball -- after AV musk, and before oil as moisturizer (one drop).

The bumps were nearly gone by the time I left the mirror, and the itching relieved. I don't think rosewater was as effective at reducing the swelling, though it also stopped the itching, last time. The cotton ball reealed something else, too: a tinge of red indicating that the skin was invisibly bleeding. I had felt my error during shaving, a sharp cutting pain, but had not seen the wound.

I am not very familiar with this kind of injury, but suspect that it is another example of the horny layer causing me technical difficulty. Like teeth sticking in a pork rind. I wonder if this is what men of color deal with all the time. I think I have heard that it is a kind of dry skin susceptible to the ingrowns. And when I was scoping out the black women's blogs, one was trying out Noxzema as an ovenight skin treatment.

Since nighttime exfoliation is recommended for the ingrowns, and these bumps seem similar to that, I will now do nighttime pumpkin juice daily... but I'm keeping the Noxzema on deck, for sure, lest I end up putting pee on my face regularly again!