Clean

lt;b>James Hamblin, MD, MPH, is a staff writer at The Atlantic, a lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health, and a specialist in preventive medicine. He is the author of If Our Bodies Could Talk and hosted a video series of the same name. He s based in Brooklyn, New York. He only uses soap on his hands.

I

Awaken

I walk off the elevator into a palatial, sun-soaked office looming seven stories over Bryant Park in Manhattan. It's the fall of 2018, some three years since I last washed my face. I'm here to see what the effects have been.

The herringbone wood floors are decorated with floral bouquets as tall as any human. The fireplace has a white mantel, and ethereal flute-based music wafts over me from somewhere. A bed draped in white linens awaits under a chandelier. This is the headquarters of an up-and-blazingly-coming skin care company called Peach and Lily. It's based in the Korean tradition and part of a Westernized movement commonly known as "K-beauty" that centers on maintenance of one's skin, often through a ritual of cleansing, toning, moisturizing, and sheet masking that can include ten or more steps.

The company's founder, Alicia Yoon, holds an MBA at Harvard Business School. She is also an esthetician, perhaps best known for her work in popularizing the application of snail secretions to the skin. In just two years, Yoon took Peach and Lily from a small internet boutique to a full line of original products distributed at retailers like Urban Outfitters and CVS. The company arrived on the crest of an enormous wave. In South Korea, where K-beauty is based on long-standing tradition, the industry has exploded to more than $13 billion per year. Its newfound popularity in the U.S. has helped make skin care a faster-growing segment of the beauty industry than makeup. Sales of high-end skin care grew 13 percent in 2018 alone, significantly faster than GDP.

I'm greeted at the elevator by a cheery assistant who asks me to disrobe. I explain that I've come to have a facial. She laughs and says she knows that, then hands me a robe and a questionnaire about my skin care routine and leaves me to change.

Alone in the space, I turn to the questionnaire, which looks like a form you might fill out in the waiting room of a doctor's office. There is a question about allergies and diet, along with a battery of questions about my skin: What exfoliants do I use? What moisturizers? What serums? What cleansers? How often have I been using each and in what order and combination?

This is a brief exercise for me, since I've been doing nothing. Yoon enters and welcomes me graciously, but the tone shifts when she sees the mostly blank form and learns that I have not simply forgotten to fill it out. "Oh my god," she says. "Are you safe to have a facial?"

"Yes! Of course-wait, why would I not be?" I hadn't really considered I was at risk before. Suddenly I'm worried. "I don't know-I mean, you tell me."

"It should probably be fine, I've just never done this on anyone . . . like this before," she trails off, either sad or disappointed or maybe both.

I lie down and she puts a bright light over my face. She touches my cheek lightly with her fingertip, then a little more firmly. Hesitantly, she says, "Have you ever felt your face?"

Funny she should ask.

I have made a point of almost never touching my face, ever since I was a teenager with "bad skin" who was under the now-obsolete impression that acne is caused by not cleaning well or aggressively enough. There were times the acne would extend to my eyelid as a stye that would nearly swell my eye shut. Social interaction became impossible because the appearance of my eye sucked all the attention out of any conversation. Even after my skin cleared up in college, I held on to the habit of keeping my hands-and the bacteria and viruses they carried-away from my face.

Not wanting to get into this long backstory, I tell Yoon that I touch my face "the normal amount," and she gets to work.

Yoon is no stranger to "problem" skin. She spent much of her life battling severe eczema, at times scratching her inflame