Wednesday, October 12, 2016 — Manhattan
* * *
I started with the serum because my face was the thing I trusted least.
Not in a room — in a room my face was a weapon, and I wielded it the way I wielded quarterly returns: precisely, with full awareness of the leverage.
But in a bathroom, alone, under flat light with no audience and no makeup and no angle to hide behind, my face was twenty-eight years old and counting, and the count had started to show.
The clinical data had arrived at noon.
Another bike messenger, another cream envelope, this time thick with pages.
No cover letter, no branding.
Just typewritten application protocols for each product — frequency, amount, order of application, areas to avoid — and twelve pages of before-and-after photographs that stopped me cold.
The befores were unremarkable.
Skin with pores, fine lines, the ordinary textures of a face that had been alive for a few decades.
The afters looked fabricated.
Pores invisible.
Lines erased, not softened — erased, as though they’d never existed.
Skin that had a quality I’d only seen in magazine retouching: smooth, even, glassy — the surface so poreless and hydrated that it looked wet, the way freshly washed fruit looks wet even after you dry it.
I’d studied the photos for twenty minutes, looking for editing artefacts, metadata inconsistencies, anything that would tell me they were fake.
I found nothing.
Either Lukas Brandt had hired the best retoucher alive or the products did what he said they did.
At ten p.m.
I locked the front door, turned off my phone, and went upstairs.
I undressed in the bathroom.
Blazer on the hook, camisole over my head, trousers folded on the counter.
I unhooked my bra — black lace, La Perla, the balconette I wore under silk because it gave my breasts a lift that made the neckline sit right — and dropped it on the pile.
I stepped out of my underwear — matching black lace, a thong that I’d worn because it was Tuesday and on Tuesdays I wore black and I was aware this was a ritual that no one knew about and that I performed for myself and that I was now documenting in my head as though someone were watching, which no one was.
I stood in front of the full-length mirror.
My body in flat bathroom light.
My breasts sat where they’d always sat — high, full, the weight of them real and round.
The nipples were rose-pink and small, the areolae slightly darker than the surrounding skin.
They were a 34D — I’d been measured at La Perla six months ago when I’d bought the set I was wearing, and the fitter had said You have beautiful breasts in a French accent that made it sound like a clinical observation rather than a compliment.
They had weight — you could see it when I walked, the way they shifted with each step — but they kept their form when I was still, and I was proud of them the way I was proud of my returns — a combination of genetics and maintenance that produced an asset worth protecting.
But.
When I raised my arms above my head, they shifted.
Not dramatically — not yet — but enough that I could see the beginning of what gravity would do over the next decade.
The upper curve was still full but the weight had started to settle lower, the crease beneath each breast a millimetre deeper than it had been at twenty-five.
I cupped them and lifted and saw what they’d looked like three years ago and what they would look like three years from now, and the delta was small but it was there.
Jar number four.
Breast firming.
I set it aside and looked at the rest.
My waist was narrow and defined, the line from my ribs to my hips a clean curve that tailors charged me extra for and men stared at in fitted dresses.
My stomach was flat — Pilates three times a week, running twice, the metabolism of a woman who ate well and worried constantly, which is the same thing as cardio.
My navel was a small vertical slit, tight, the skin around it smooth.
My hips flared from my waist in a ratio that I’d measured once, out of curiosity, and found was 0.68, which put me in the range that evolutionary psychology papers cited as universally attractive, which I’d read at twenty-two and never thought about again except every time I looked in a mirror.
My ass.
I turned.
Round, firm, high — the cheeks tight, the crease beneath them sharp, the shape visible in anything I wore, from gala gowns to the Lululemon leggings I ran in.
Men looked.
I knew they looked.
I could feel the looking the way you feel weather — a change in pressure when I walked past, a silence that lasted half a beat too long.
My ass was an asset and I maintained it and I was not embarrassed by any of this because embarrassment was a tax on women who hadn’t figured out that their body was capital.
My legs.
Long, bare, toned from the running and the Pilates.
Inner thighs smooth but — I looked closer — the skin there was softer than the rest, less taut, the kind of texture that was invisible in candlelight and honest in LEDs.
My calves were defined.
My ankles were narrow.
My feet were bare on the cold marble, long and arched, the toenails unpainted because I’d taken off the polish on Sunday and hadn’t reapplied.
And then there was the hair.
I looked between my legs.
The blonde landing strip — narrow, straight, kept short with a trimmer — with the skin on either side waxed smooth.
Except it wasn’t smooth — it was four days past the appointment, now six, and fine blonde hairs were coming in at the edges, soft and barely visible but there, and below the strip the skin was stippled with the ghost of follicles that would need attention within a week.
My underarms — I raised my arms — clean, I’d shaved yesterday, but by tomorrow the stubble would be there, the way it was always there, the way it had been there since I was thirteen and my mother had handed me a razor and said This is what we do now in her flat Scandinavian way.
My legs: shaved two days ago, still smooth at the calf, starting to come in at the shin and the inner thigh.
The backs of my thighs — fine, blonde, invisible to anyone who wasn’t inspecting them, which I was.
I spent twenty minutes of every week managing hair.
Waxing, shaving, plucking, inspecting.
Twenty minutes that I resented with the same quiet fury I reserved for expense reports and men who talked over me in meetings.
Jar number three.
Body hair prevention.
I lined up the five jars on the counter next to the La Mer I hadn’t opened in three days.
The La Mer in its white jar with its gold lid looked like a prop next to the five matte black containers.
Like something from a different era — the era before the man who’d walked out of Sushi Nakazawa and left me sitting with orchids and green tea.
I opened jar number one.
The anti-aging serum was clear, slightly viscous, with no scent.
The protocol said: half a pump, both hands, press into face and neck, avoid eyes.
Use nightly.
I applied it.
The texture was unlike anything I’d used.
It absorbed into my skin in seconds — no residue, no film, no greasiness.
Just gone, as though the skin had been waiting for it and swallowed it whole.
My face felt tight for a moment, then warm, then nothing.
Clean.
I opened jar number two.
The glow serum was thicker, faintly iridescent — not shimmer, not glitter, but a quality in the liquid itself that caught the bathroom light and held it.
The protocol said: three drops, both hands, press into face, neck, and décolleté.
Use morning and evening.
I applied it over the anti-aging serum.
This one sat on the surface for a moment — a thin, even layer that made my skin look wet — and then absorbed.
The warmth returned, deeper this time, spreading across my cheekbones and down my neck to the tops of my breasts.
I looked in the mirror.
My skin was the same.
Maybe slightly more even.
Maybe slightly brighter.
Probably placebo.
Jar number three.
Body hair prevention.
The protocol said: apply to all areas where hair removal is desired.
Twice weekly for two weeks, then once weekly for two weeks, then cease.
I squeezed a small amount onto my fingers.
Cool, smooth, no scent.
I applied it to my underarms first, then my legs — calves, shins, inner thighs, the backs of my knees.
Then my bikini area — the edges of the strip, the inner thighs near the crease, the skin between my legs that I waxed every two weeks and that a man I’d met five days ago had somehow known was overdue.
I stood there with product on my body and looked at myself and thought: I run a fund worth four hundred million and here I am, bare under the bathroom LEDs at ten-thirty at night rubbing an unlabelled cream onto my bikini line because a man with no internet presence told me it would stop my hair from growing.
This was either the smartest thing I’d ever done or the stupidest.
Jar number four.
Breast firming.
The protocol said: apply to the entire breast and décolleté area, from collarbone to the lower crease of the breast, including the sides.
I squeezed the compound onto my hands — thicker than the serums, white, with a faint cooling effect.
I applied it to my right breast first, starting at the collarbone, working down over the upper curve, over the nipple — which tightened at the touch, the cold and the newness of it — along the side, underneath, into the crease.
Then the left.
The compound sat on the skin for a few seconds, cool and present, and then absorbed.
My breasts felt — I cupped them — the same.
Maybe firmer.
Maybe that was the cold.
Maybe that was my hands.
Jar number five.
Hair growth and shine.
The protocol said: apply to damp scalp, massage for two minutes, leave in.
I wet my hair at the sink, squeezed a pump into my palm, and worked it in.
The texture was light, almost watery, and it tingled as I massaged it into my scalp — not unpleasant, like the first bite of peppermint, a fizzing aliveness that spread from my temples to the crown of my head.
I wrapped my hair in a towel and looked at myself one more time.
Five products.
Five promises.
My body covered in compounds made by a man who’d left Stanford and disappeared and resurfaced at a charity gala with a tuxedo and a thesis on my trading strategy and my skincare failures.
I put on a T-shirt.
Got into bed.
Lay there.
My skin hummed.
A low, diffuse warmth across my face and neck and breasts and legs that was probably circulation and was definitely not nothing.
The products were doing something — whether that something was chemistry or placebo or the memory of his eyes in the private room, I didn’t know.
I set my alarm for six and stared at the ceiling.
Six weeks.
Then he’d tell me about the hundred-billion-dollar company.
I turned off the light and felt the warmth of five products absorbing into my skin and closed my eyes and tried not to think about his forearms in the rolled cashmere and the way he’d said You were looking for me as if it was a fact and not an accusation, and failed.