Victoria Beckham is believed to be a big fan of this more unusual anti-ageing facial.
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Fiona Duncan gets a nightingale dropping facial. I lay back on the pillow with some trepidation as the therapist busies herself with a strange smelling concoction. My therapist, a delicate Chinese girl, shows me the pungent powder. It looks harmless enough, though it exudes a faint but undeniable whiff of something unmentionable. She applies an exfoliant to my face and next the mask, for which the whiffy white powder is mixed with rosewater to form a creamy paste. The smell engulfs my nostrils as she begins slathering my face in goo.
Or, more accurately, guano. My face is now buried under a mask of nightingale poop.
The white powder with the undeniable pong comprises the highly prized and very expensive droppings of one particular nightingale, the Japanese warbler. It has been collected in specialist nightingale farms in Japan for centuries, and now the power of the poo has found its way to the West and has been harnessed for use, in sanitized powder form. It’s already popular in the US: Hollywood ‘A’ listers can’t get enough, apparently.
“I’ve been flying to New York for my nightingale facials” one relieved customer told my therapist; “now I don’t have to”.
As my therapist proceeds with a relaxing face and head massage while the poo works its magic, I start to feel cleansed and soothed. And the smell is not so bad once you get used to it.
But is this just a crazy new facial fad? Apparently it was the Koreans, 1,000 years ago, who first discovered the restorative properties that lurk inside every Japanese bush warbler’s number twos. How their potency was revealed in the first place remains a mystery – a tree, a bird, a passing lady?
The treatment then became popular among geisha girls and kabuki dancers who used nightingale droppings to balance skin tone and to repair the skin damage caused by the heavy white make-up containing zinc and lead that they traditionally used.
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Source: Telegraph