Face invader
Sam Leith has a facial — and is troubled to find that he has to remove all his clothes Ihaven't felt like this since I last went to visit the dental hygienist with my mum. I'm standing in a coolly antiseptic reception room, mooching and scuffing my feet and sighing theatrically. while my travelling companion discusses 'treatments' for me with the uniformed lady behind the desk.
I have hitherto made it my practice not to have much truck with beauty treatments, on the grounds that they are timeconsuming, bogus, expensive, and for girls — and that they offer a uniquely revolting and contradictory marriage of late capitalist excess and hippy rhetoric. Moreover, I am a firm believer in the ancient Scottish saying 'You cannae polish a turd.'
But my travelling companion is a lady of some forcefulness — and I fear greatly her reaction to seeing my `free-treatment-ofyour-choice' voucher going to waste. A long menu of options designed to 'soothe', 'invigorate', 'pamper' or 'restore essential B-Omega vitamins and oxygenate tired eyes' is presented to me. I can be wrapped in seaweed, smeared in mud, or otherwise immersed in a range of things one normally tries to wash off in the bath. No thanks. I fear the humiliation of a pedicurist running screaming from my feet, and ever since an embarrassing misunderstanding at a massage parlour in Chinatown in New York, I have had issues with back-rubs. A `men's facial', then, sounds the most painless of the lot. No need to get my clothes off. I'll just sit in a chair, let them bung some cream on my face, and then return to the bar having proved my openmindedness. So sure enough, five minutes later, here I am with another tranquil lady in a uniform saying, `Take off all your clothes.' But it's my face that's at issue. Look. Here it is. Are you going to do a facial on my torso? No dice. She indicates a wooden locker filled with fluffy white towels, a soft white dressing-gown, a pair of flip-flops, and then shimmers out. No one, she says, will disturb me. Nevertheless, I put the gown on before I shed my shreddies. I wait for my personal therapist in an ominous white antechamber. On the low wooden coffee table is a form for me to fill out. It asks me whether I use an IUD. I tick the box for 'no'. Somewhere a little way off, essential oils are being vapourised. There is a definite sense of whalesong. It is soothing. I am terrified.
Finally my personal therapist, dressed in a white uniform, arrives and leads me through a slatted wooden door, down a white corridor lined with slatted wooden doors, and into a white private room. Aromatherapy candles are burning. In the centre of the room is a white bed/chair, cantilevered into the shape of a supine zed, with a white blanket and white sheets on it. Beside it are a pair of nameless punishment machines with Anglepoise necks that belong in a Sylvia Plath poem, or a Terry Gilliam film, or at the dentist.
'Take off your robe and lie down here,' she says, sliding a hand under the tightly tucked-in sheet. 'I'll be back in a moment.' She leaves the room. I slide in quickly and pull the covers as far up as I can. So now I am lying on my back, tightly tucked in, stark naked and completely defenceless. For a facial. When she returns, to my horror, she lifts up the edge of the sheet. 'Put your arms under here.' All that is now sticking out of my Z-shaped cocoon are my head and shoulders. I realise suddenly why they make you strip; make you — in defiance of Victorian convention — keep your arms under the covers; make you remove all forms of jewellery or clothing that could serve as a prop to your identity or individual will. It's so that you can't defend yourself or run away.
I close my eyes, and she starts slathering my face with a sort of cool gunk and pushing it up my nose. Then, just as I am adjusting to that, she changes pace and starts to attack me with a pair of scouring pads. I am starting to feel disoriented. Now she's laying — what? — what feel like slices of warm Edam on my eyes. . . there is a painfully hot sensation on my left cheek and the sound of a machine ... doing ... something. Hot. Hard to breathe. Like when you sit too close to the fire in a sauna. At some point in all this, I become aware that she is trying to sell me things. It says on your questionnaire that you wash your face with soap,' she says. `Yup,' I say, feeling pleased with myself. 'Almost every day.' 'That's very bad,' she says. She offered a 'very good-value' cleanser suitable for my skin type that she'd be happy to charge to my room. And another potion that, she said, would help to lighten the `discolouration' under my eyes (I like that discolouration. I've had bruised eyes since I was born.) I mumble apologetically that I'll wait till I am vertical to go shopping for cosmetics.
She mutters something and I sense her wandering off. Has she gone for a fag? How long am I to be left here with this dragon breathing on my cheek and this cheese on my eyes? If I take the cheese off, in order to find out what's going on, will I see her standing there, waiting to catch me out, and preparing further punishments? I daren't take the risk. I wait. And wait.
I'm starting to drift, when comes a sudden, bright light, an adjustment, and the hot breath of steam subsides. Sweat cools on my cheeks. The slices are lifted from my eyes. Then suddenly, jeepers, she's at me with the scouring pads again. And no sooner does that stop than she is spritzing me with Windolene. She pats my face thy. And then, with ferocious vigour. she starts squeezing my spots. This wasn't in the manifesto.
'Ouch!' says my nose. 'Ssssh,' I say. 'We're all in this together.' Dough we're dot,' says my nose, and then, again, 'oval!' as my personal therapist goes after blocked pores that I hesitate to tackle myself. My eyes start to water. My personal therapist is making approving noises about what is 'coming out'. I honestly, honestly don't want to know.
Then she massages a layer of butter or possibly marge into my forehead and cheeks before announcing. 'This is your facial.' (What was all that so far? Foreplay?) Another layer of goo is applied in some detail and then she lays a fresh pair of cheese slices over my eyes, as you might throw a blanket over the parrot's cage or hood a hawk. I hear her voice, murmuring, whether to herself or to a collaborator somewhere in the corner of the room. Then a soft click, and she is gone.
I try to compose my thoughts, but this bed contraption is oddly comfortable, and my mind is starting to drift. Mmm. Focus. I try to tell myselfi but an endless loop of infernal smooth ja77 is being piped out of speakers somewhere. It saps the will and scrambles my ability to think sequentially. Nakedness, depersonalisation, submission, passivity, mental distraction, disorientation — these are the classic tools of the brainwasher, the CIA interrogator, proprietors of jazz clubs everywhere, I think. But it's comfy. Are there drugs in the candles? My will to escape is dwindling. I wonder whether I will find myself, three weeks from now, in another white room somewhere far away, drinking a farewell toast to the world with a cup of grape-flavour Kool-Aid. Perhaps that wouldn't be so bad. It's warm here. Mmm. Aaah. Comfy. Horrible, horrible music. Comfy.
Minutes pass, possibly hours. And suddenly I feel cool air around my eyes, my facial is being towelled off me, and I am encouraged to get up and get dressed. I feel very, very peculiar. First chance I get, I sneak a look in a mirror. Do you know what? I look suspiciously like me.
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