Only in Mike Bloomberg’s Manhattan. Craving a Big Gulp? Better have a good lawyer. Want to do something special for your face? Treat it to a bird poo poultice at a luxury spa.
At Shizuka New York skin care salon off Fifth Avenue, roughly 100 clients a month are shelling out $180 each for a traditional Japanese facial “using imported Asian nightingale excrement mixed with rice bran,” reports Verna Dobnik for the Associated Press. The treatment is touted as “a way to keep the face soft and smooth using an enzyme in the poop to gently exfoliate the skin.”
While the spa’s eponymous owner Shizuka Bernstein has been offering the Geisha Facial for only five years, the beauty secret is thought to date back to the 1600s, when it was stumbled upon (but how?) by Japanese geishas and actors.
The AP supplied this account of 35-year-old New Yorker Mari Miyoshi’s first fecal facial:
“The treatment begins with steam to open the pores and soften the skin. Cream is applied. And then comes what Bernstein calls ‘the nightingale part.’
She pours the cream-colored poop, dried and finely ground, into a bowl, mixing it with the rice bran using a small spatula. She applies the potion to Miyoshi’s face with a brush, rubbing it in with her hands.
Does it smell?
‘Yes, but like toasted rice,’ Miyoshi said.”
Mm, scrumptious. But for $180? Who — besides Mike Bloomberg — can afford to burn that kind of lettuce on a sniff of toasted rice?
If you think dropping that kind of doo—DOUGH — that kind of dough on a trendy, unproven treatment is for the birds, fear not.
While allowing that the treatment “definitely has some rejuvenating effect,” it is no improvement over “an apricot scrub or a mask that you could buy in a local pharmacy,” said Manhattan dermatologist Dr. Michele Green.
Well, duh! Nothing beats our old apricot scrubs. Like we needed someone with a medical degree to tell us that.
• Daniel Wattenberg can be reached at dwattenberg@washingtontimes.com.
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