Hello from London in the third week of four, just living here to see what it’s like to live here.

I get up early to get to Soho to get my first facial: let’s get into 41 as fresh as possible. The facial takes place in a basement, in bougie skin place all frosted green and white, in an alley with a dozen or so sex shops and titty bars. The basement treatment room is walking a fine line between massage parlor and dentist torture chamber. My clinician is named Bloena. She extracts three things that I do not even begin to comprehend, not because her Russian accent is thick, but because I literally do not know the word she is saying and she’s removing them with a needle and I can’t guess what they are from my side of the procedure. I make a note to look it up after, but promptly forget the word and now it is lost forever, or until I decide to do some light googling*.

She attaches two electrodes to me: one to my shoulder, one to my… skull? to conduct electricity through my skin to pull a vitamin c mask deeper into the tissue to calm my nose and cheeks that have just been strawberried between her gleeful fingers. “Sorry if hurts, but I cannot help myself when I see pores as bad this ones. Overall very good, especially for a man, especially from… Kaliforniya, but I must squeeze them, sorry.” Great, grand, cool. Afterwards my skin is softer than it has literally ever been and my pores, while perhaps more visible at the moment, are crystal clear.

Anyway here is me in a Zoom meeting between me and nobody that I stood up specifically to see how my skin looked in the cam solely through which my coworkers experience me. I am not not a camgirl.

*They were milia, plural for milium: tiny keratin buildups.