So You Want to Be a Facialist?

In 2020, Garrette emerged from an internet-wide search for faces to represent the launch of Rihanna’s Fenty Skin. “I went through this rigorous interview process, three months long,” Garrette said. In the end, it came down to a final two. “Rihanna picked me.” A year later, tracing the pop star’s own trajectory, Garrette was called to a higher LVMH honor, becoming a Dior Skin ambassador. He’s a regular at beauty industry events, and looks at home on a step-and-repeat.

For all of the confidence he projects online, Garrette seems at least slightly bewildered by his sudden success. “It’s not something I actually expected,” he says, somewhat shyly. “My facial practice has completely evolved.” He still sets up spa suites for VIP clients, and is hoping to open a permanent space in New York, but most of his work involves brand education—about, say, Dior’s fabulous range of skin-care products—which hearkens back to his receptionist days. “Product is really where I feel like I excel,” he says, sounding like Valmy. “As facialists, we see clients and put them on the right path, but it’s really what they do at home that’s going to continue those results.”

Medina-Cleghorn’s first job was at Joanna Czech’s New York spa, where she eventually became a manager. One of her biggest learnings was modeled after Czech’s bedside manner, which is polite, but not deferential. “I want to make the client experience as comfortable and as luxurious as it can be,” she told me. “But it’s not in my personality to be like, yes, yes, yes, follow me…” She briefly mimed a hunched spa attendant. “I got to see how you can become friends with your clients in this other way that really feels more natural to me.” (Another thing she took with her was Ereka Dunn, Joanna Czech’s Chief Brand Officer, who became a co-founder of Raquel New York.)

If Joanna Czech could pass on one piece of advice to the next generation of facialists, what would it be? “Continuous education,” Czech says over Zoom. She estimates she has about 13,000 hours of study and counting, as if the curriculum for her esthetics license never ended. She attends seminars whenever she can, and just returned from Poland, where she learned a new method of massage. To underline her point, she picks up a book on her bedside table called The Science of Beauty. “This is my bedtime reading!”

Every facialist has influences, mentors, even benefactors, but all of the ones I spoke to work for themselves. This allows them to set their own prices and hire their own talent, and it also gives them freedom of expression. Medina-Cleghorn has adopted Vodder lymphatic drainage, a certifiable technique developed a century ago by a Danish couple of lymphologists. Gill favors a form of manuka honey crafted by bees in New Zealand. Sophie Carbonari, based in Paris, blends her facials with Eastern wisdom, including a technique of Japanese origin where she moves facial fascia, producing an audible cracking sound.

The bookings happen organically, says her assistant, a fresh-faced Englishwoman named Danielle. “We let a few select people know that she’s going to be going over there, and once somebody’s had a facial with her, whether it’s in Paris or while she’s been on the road, they generally want to recommend her to their friends,” she says. “So, you know, we’re lucky that way.” Carbonari’s home studio is in Paris’ Palais Royale, but she sets up satellite shops alongside events like the Golden Globes or Met Gala, or in other fashion cities during show season.

Carbonari spent an educational interlude in New York, working in a plastic surgeon’s office near Grand Central. “The funny thing is, she hired me because I was French,” Carbonari told me, laughing. Her speech is emphatic, and every other anecdote sends her arms fluttering. “That’s all! She was like, ‘You speak French, you’re French, you have the French way.’” She was fascinated by the differences in aesthetic sensibility between European and American women.

“New Yorkers are really into beauty,” Carbonari says. Some of her clients would come back twice in one week. “I would say, you don’t have to come every week! They thought I was funny.”