So. Even Kareena doesn't get facials.

So I learnt from the newspapers this morning. Apart from this very valid nugget of information, I also learnt that she eats every two hours. And drinks a lot of water. Thus far, it sounds like Kareena and me have a lot in common, except of course for the size zero bit and we could prolly sit down comfortably sometime and exchange notes on how we avoid facials. That of course, is where our paths diverge, she also claims to eat a lot of green veggies, stuff like broccoli for which I would need a gun placed at temple to be induced to get down my food pipe, and drinks a lot of water. The only lot of water I drink is the one that is processed in a factory and emerges as carbonated beverage. Or the one that is added to dilute the vodka. Yes. But I still don’t get facials done.
The girls at the local salon I step into occasionally to get the brow back from the wilderness it escapes into, and to get mandatory stuff like manicures pedicures and waxing done (and I am fanatical about these) ask me curiously, “Aap facial kyun nahin karaatey? At least clean up karao!” their faces wrought with concern over open pores the size of meteor impact sites on my nose, and skin that looks like it has been hung out to be cured before being converted into a nice messenger bag. I demur politely. I don’t like facials, I tell them. What I don’t add is that I am terribly jumpy and find it extremely unnerving to be lying down for the better part of the hour DOING NOTHING while some poor soul kneads my face into dough and slathers on all sorts of masks and such like and then finally thrusts my face at me in a mirror demanding to know if it looks better. And, terrified I will nod and claim I look twenty years younger and that she has wrought a miracle and will run squealing out of the parlour and examine face for blotchiness and sudden eruptions of pimples which will inevitably happen within twenty four hours of getting a facial done.
To the best of my memory I have had approximately three or four facials done all my life. The first was a week before I was to get married. Those were the grim old days when they used scary steel implements to remove blackheads. Of course, my pain threshold then hadn’t yet experienced Infertility treatment and childbirth and they had to drag me back inside the parlour and have two people hold me down while they squeezed off the blackheads from the other side of the nose. That scared me enough to have me put off getting facials done, and when friends look at my skin and cluck cluck telling me I must go in for one every month now that I’ve reached premenopausal levels of badly behaving skin, I demur politely and change the topic with a speed only rivaled by me untagging myself from a fat photograph on facebook. The next I remember getting a facial is for the child’s naming ceremony. That too speeded up because I needed to get home quick before the two hourly alarm for feeding went up and roused the neighbourhood and the corpses in the local graveyard. The interval between the two facials was exactly eight years. Post that, I did a facial at Kaya early this year when the book came out, eight years later, after I saw pictures of self after initial reading where I looked like someone had taken a broom to me and attacked me with a vengeance reserved for creepy crawly reptilian creatures. This time round, I found out, as I tensed myself up for the inevitable blackhead removal, they had a wondrous thing called a vacuum machine type thingie which just went pop on your face and removed them nasty crusty deposits in your skin and leave it free of the infernal things. But yes, haven’t been back for another one. That was in Feb. It is now November. Given the exact eight yearly intervals between my facials, I can safely say my next facial might be circa 2020. By then, I hope they find a method that involves you popping a pill to have a facial done.
The article this morning reaffirmed my faith that I was doing something right. No facials. The skin can behave with soap and water and moisturiser and sunscreen. If not, I’m not investing two hours of being in supine position with nothing exciting happening to me apart from someone kneading my face. You know.

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