I might be one of the last New York fashion editors of my generation not to use Botox. I believe this to be true because I go to fashion shows, dozens of them a year, and across the runways I see a lot of foreheads. But if I’m proudly creased above the brows, harder to abide are my aging neck and the sagging skin at my jawline (even typing the word jowls makes me shudder).
Which is why I visited the skin care specialist Aida Bicaj in her new Tribeca spa. An easy walk from the Vogue offices at One World Trade Center, the N. Moore Street location is efficiently elegant, with a wall of the cultishly popular Biologique Recherche products behind the front desk. Bicaj, who is Albanian and immigrated to the US in 1992, when war broke out in Bosnia, worked for the French luxury skincare brand for 10 years before going into business for herself in 2006; her Upper East Side spa opened in 2010.
Studying my skin under the loupe, Bicaj told me it looked good, but that I was going about getting to good all wrong. Cetaphil cleanser and Retinoid cream, the only two products I use reliably (I’m low-maintenance, if I haven’t already made that clear), were not just drying, but actually thinning my skin. And that’s not a desirable situation in middle age, when the skin is already prone to thinness.
She began with a Soin Lissant treatment, which combines lymphatic massage and a gentle powder of alpha hydroxy acids and natural moisturizing factors in a base of milk protein to drain, smooth, and tone the skin on my face, neck, and decolletage, and asked questions about my diet. Sugar, dairy, and processed foods, she reminded me, all contribute to clogged pores and spotty skin, the problems that got me hooked on the Retinoid, in the first place. Yogurt would be tough to give up, I told her, and she advised me to try the sheep milk kind, which is higher in calcium and lower in artificial hormones than cow’s milk.
Her attentive pampering was completely unlike the extractive facials I remember from my 20s and 30s. “As the skin gets older,” she told me, “it needs deep cleaning less. But it does get drier, and the retinol aggravated the skin mantle. We need to calm and soothe your skin.” After the smoothing treatment, she gave me her signature remodeling facial, during which she used Biologique Recherche’s proprietary bio-electrotherapy machine, to tighten and firm my skin. With repetition, she said, the treatment can actually strengthen facial muscle memory. She has some clients who see her weekly. I would be starting my Biologique Recherche journey at home.
