Wednesday, October 19, 2016 — Manhattan
* * *
Something was different.
I noticed it on Wednesday morning, a week and a half after I’d started the products, standing at my bathroom mirror at six-fifteen with my hair piled on top of my head and my face bare and my T-shirt on the floor.
My skin.
I leaned in.
The bathroom light was the same flat LED it had always been — honest, unforgiving, the light that showed pores and texture and every lie the night cream industry had ever told.
Under that light, my skin looked — I turned my head, checking the angle — smoother.
Not dramatically.
Not overnight-miracle smooth.
But the texture across my cheekbones and forehead, which had always had a fine grain to it, like expensive paper, had softened.
The pores at my nose — visible since my early twenties, the thing I checked first every morning — were smaller.
Not gone.
Smaller.
I pressed my fingertips to my cheek.
The skin felt tighter.
Not taut, not pulled, not the feeling you get from a clay mask that dries and makes your face feel like a drum.
This was something underneath — as though the scaffolding beneath the surface had shifted, the way a building looks the same from the outside when someone reinforces the foundation.
Could be placebo.
I was a woman who’d spent sixty dollars on a jade roller because a wellness influencer I followed on Instagram said it boosted lymphatic drainage, and I’d used it for three weeks before admitting that it was a cold rock and I’d been had.
But this didn’t feel like placebo.
Placebo felt like hope.
This felt like data.
I stepped back and looked at the rest of me.
My breasts.
I cupped them — a thing I did every morning, the way other people checked their phones, a quick assessment of where things stood.
They felt — I pressed gently, testing the firmness — different.
Fuller at the top.
The upper curve, which I’d studied a week ago and noticed the early drift of gravity, was rounder.
I stood straight, arms at my sides, and looked.
My breasts sat high on my chest, the nipples pointing forward instead of the faint downward angle I’d been watching develop.
The skin across my décolleté — from my collarbones to the tops of my breasts — was tighter, smoother, the texture of skin that had been ironed from the inside.
One week.
The protocol said full effect in four to six weeks.
This was week one, and the breast firming was already doing something that two hundred dollars of La Mer and a Pilates addiction had never accomplished.
I turned sideways.
My profile in the mirror: the line from my chin down my neck to my chest, the swell of my breasts in profile — rounder, the upper pole fuller, the crease beneath tighter.
I looked like myself at twenty-five.
I looked like the version of myself I saw in photos from three years ago and mourned in the quiet way women mourn things that nobody else has noticed are gone.
The glow.
That was the other thing.
The glow serum had been the product I’d dismissed as marketing — glass skin, the beauty editors called it, which was a thing you saw on Korean skincare influencers and Glossier ads and nowhere in real life.
But my skin, in the flat bathroom light at six-fifteen on a Wednesday morning, had a quality to it that I hadn’t seen before.
A sheen.
Not oily, not shimmery, not the fake dewiness of a highlighting powder.
A translucence, as though the top layer of my skin had thinned just enough to let the light reach the layer underneath and bounce back.
I looked like I’d just come from a spa.
I looked like I’d slept twelve hours.
I looked dewy and ripe and alive, and I hadn’t done anything except apply two pumps of an unlabelled serum from a matte black jar formulated by a computational biologist who’d vanished from academia.
I showered.
Washed my hair — the shampoo I’d used since college, because I was loyal to things that worked and suspicious of things that promised to work better.
As I rinsed, I noticed: my hair felt heavier.
Thicker between my fingers.
The individual strands were denser, less flyaway.
When I squeezed the water out, the weight of it surprised me.
Jar number five.
One week.
I towelled off and stood in front of the mirror again.
The body hair.
I raised my right arm and looked at my underarm.
Smooth.
Completely smooth — not the stubble-by-tomorrow smooth of a razor, but smooth like waxed, except I hadn’t waxed.
I’d shaved five days ago.
By now, there should have been stubble — fine, blonde, barely visible but present.
There was nothing.
Just skin, bare and soft, not even the stippled texture of dormant follicles.
My legs.
I ran my hand down my right calf, then my shin, then my inner thigh.
Smooth.
All of it.
No stubble, no regrowth, no fine hairs at the knee or the back of the thigh.
I checked behind my knees — smooth.
My ankles — smooth.
The skin felt different, too — softer, finer, as though the absence of follicles had changed the texture itself.
Between my legs, the trimmed strip remained — the product was designed to leave scalp, brows, lashes, and a trimmed strip if you wanted one.
But the skin around it, the skin I waxed every two weeks and that had been growing back at the edges — smooth.
Clean.
Not a single hair.
Not even the shadow of one coming in.
I stood naked in my bathroom and looked at my body and tried to identify the emotion I was experiencing.
It wasn’t gratitude.
It wasn’t excitement.
It was something closer to vertigo — the feeling of standing at the edge of a high place and looking down and realising that the drop is both more beautiful and more terrifying than you’d expected.
These products worked.
Not might work.
Not showed promising results in early trials.
They worked.
In one week, with twice-daily application, five unlabelled compounds had done more to my body than every product I’d ever used combined.
I got dressed.
Black wool Stella McCartney trousers, tapered at the ankle.
A cream silk Vince blouse that buttoned to the sternum and showed a V of skin and the shadow of my cleavage — enough to remind a room that I had breasts, not enough to let them forget I had a brain.
A fitted black Smythe blazer, single-breasted, the lapels sharp.
Black suede Jimmy Choo pumps, pointed toe, four inches.
My hair down — blown dry from the shower, falling in waves that were thicker and glossier than they’d been two weeks ago.
I looked at myself in the hall mirror on my way out.
My skin looked wet.
Not oily, not sweaty — wet the way a grape looks wet, the surface taut and glassy, the pores invisible, the texture so smooth that the bathroom light slid across my cheekbones without catching.
The concealer I’d put at the corners of my eyes was unnecessary.
The two creases I’d been tracking for months were softer and shallower and less like a verdict.
My analyst — Rebecca, twenty-four, MIT, the kind of woman who noticed everything and said nothing — looked up when I walked in and then looked again.
“New moisturizer?” she asked.
“Maybe.”
“Your skin looks amazing.”
“Thank you.”
I sat at my desk and opened my terminal and tried to work and couldn’t.
I opened a browser.
Typed Lukas Brandt Stanford into Google.
This time, knowing the surname, the results were different.
L.
Brandt.
Stanford Department of Computational Biology.
Seven papers in PubMed, co-authored between 2012 and 2015.
Computational approaches to protein folding in dermal collagen matrices.
Algorithmic modelling of follicular stem cell differentiation.
Machine learning applications in structural tissue engineering.
The titles were dense and specific and I understood approximately one word in three, but I understood enough: he’d been doing the science behind these products at Stanford, in the open, published, before he’d gone dark.
I clicked on his faculty page.
It redirected to a 404.
Removed.
I tried LinkedIn.
No profile.
I tried the Stanford alumni directory.
His name appeared — Brandt, Lukas M., PhD, Computational Biology, 2012-2015 — but with no contact information, no photo, no forwarding address.
I searched the patent databases.
Three patents filed between 2013 and 2015, all through Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing: a collagen-remodelling compound, a follicular inhibitor, a structural-tissue binding agent.
After 2015, two more patents — filed through a Liechtenstein entity called Lumen AG, with no inventor name attached.
Lumen.
I typed Lumen AG Liechtenstein into the search bar.
A registered entity, incorporated in Vaduz, 2015.
No website.
No listed directors.
No public filings beyond the incorporation documents.
I sat at my desk and stared at the screen.
My skin was glowing.
My breasts sat higher than they had a week ago.
My legs were bare and smooth under the Stella McCartney trousers and they would stay bare and smooth without a razor or a wax appointment or a single thought.
I picked up my phone and texted Naomi — my college roommate, now an OB-GYN in Boston, the only person who knew me well enough to hear the subtext in a text message.
Still alive.
Skin is insane.
Might be a cult.
She responded in thirty seconds: Is it the man from the gala??
Yes.
Eliana.
Have you slept with him?
No.
Do you want to?
I looked at the text.
I put the phone face-down on the desk.
Then I picked it up and typed: I want to understand what he built.
The rest is irrelevant.
Naomi’s reply: Sure it is, babe.
I turned off the phone and went back to the patents and the 404 pages and the Liechtenstein shell company, and I kept my legs crossed under my desk and felt the smooth, hairless skin of my inner thighs press together and tried not to think about the fact that a man I’d met twice had changed my body more in ten days than twenty-eight years of genetics and grooming, and that the change was only beginning.