What it feels like to get a 24k gold facial

‘Help me I’m pore”, is something I often say. When the genetics lottery rolled around, it fell in my favour in that I skipped acne, but when it came time for pores to be handed out, mine were bigger.

Now, men like to brag about size, sure, but when it comes to the craters on your nose, that’s when you pray for smaller.

Alas, a busy life meant skincare wasn’t exactly the first thing on my agenda until a few years ago, when facials became a monthly must-do and I realised that sloughing off a layer of dead skin cells goes a long way to narrowing those pesky pores.

There were the cheap and cheerful options, fly-by-night spas and places with questionable decor. Until a recent trip to Valley Lodge and Spa in Magaliesburg.

I won R2 000 worth of treatments for me and a friend and I knew exactly what I wanted – the 24-carat gold face mask with a hefty R1 000 price tag. The reason was pure decadence.

There’s this trashy side to me that, much like Justin Bieber driving around in a copper Lamborghini, is tasteless but associates precious metals with wealth.

The treatment starts simply enough: a massage before warm towels are placed over your face to open up the pores. Another massage with serum follows before the gold is applied.

Picture: iStock

There are different gold face mask techniques (popularised as Cleopatra masks). The first involves an adhesive to stick the gold leaf to your face. The other is a clay with gold dust that also exfoliates.

On the day, the second one was a clear winner. With my giant pores, exfoliation is key. The mix is left to dry before it is removed. This is the fun process.

A sheet of tissue paper is placed over a magnet and the gold remnants are removed by swiping it over your face. Little specks of metal being pulled from your skin is a novel experience. Then, the last bits of the mask are removed, another serum and finally another massage.

In some ways, decadence should be bad for you. It should lead to pangs of guilt about the real world that continues to spin out of control outside the doors. But the narcotic blend of a trickling indoor waterfall and literal gold on your face means those knocks on the guilt-door are almost nonexistent.

On your first look in the mirror at a face that has the remnants of a gold sheen, you can’t help but feel a little bit more expensive than you did 60 minutes ago.

A gold face mask stimulates your dopamine receptors and gives you the same feeling as reading a trashy novel, watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians, or sneaking that joint behind the media centre at high school.

It’s the kind of facial you get for the feeling, not the result. If you want tight pores, a good steam and bentonite clay is still the way to go. But if you want to shimmer for a few seconds, hey, who am I to judge?

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