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House debates vaccine safety
Critics say mandatory inoculations may do more harm than good. But what about all the lives that have been saved?
By Arthur Allen
[08/05/99]

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[08/04/99]

Urge
Feel his guns?
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By Greg Nott
[08/03/99]

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The idea of having my face slathered with a layer of opalescent, nutty black eggs from the belly of a mature, bottom-feeding beluga sturgeon leaves me feeling both slightly euphoric and a tad queasy. An indulgence of almost wanton proportions, caviar has always been reserved for very special, extravagant occasions -- a bacchanalian wedding feast, a lavish business affair. In short, I will not buy caviar for myself but will happily, with great piggish gusto, consume it from others. I'm therefore slightly disappointed to find out that Elyzabeth does not use actual caviar in her facials ("You would only end up eating it off your face," she explains) but rather a form of highly concentrated caviar extract. Still, the alleged miracles of the shiny aquatic eggs, in raw or distilled form, are taken seriously here, and before I am introduced to caviar with all its epidermal merits I am given a primer on basic skin care.

"You can put whatever you want on your face, but if you don't clean your face regularly with facials, nothing -- and I mean nothing -- will work." Elyzabeth leans forward while a coterie of well-coifed aestheticians busily work the hair of several early-rising Hollywood patrons. "American women know hair, makeup and fingernails, but they know close to nothing about aesthetics, and even less about retarding the aging process," she adds.

Perhaps she's right. Behind me mirrors reflect, in hundreds of increasingly tiny forms, the receding image of my own aging self. Beauty care has never ranked high on my to-do list of life, in large measure because I have never suffered from the pimple fests, acne supernovas and facial moonscapes that mark the hormonally riotous years of so many teenagers. Rather, my teenage years were marked by obsessive tanning, for which my water-leached skin is now badly paying. I have also not escaped the faint crow's feet and tiny fissure-like wrinkles that mark time's creeping advance, and have done close to nothing to "retard" this process.

Sooner or later, everyone's skin follows the same route. Every two weeks, the thickest outer layer of our epidermis, called the horny layer (or the stratum corneum), sloughs off to reveal a new layer. Ignored, our facial skin is like a funky screen door after a dust bowl. Freshly steamed and cleaned, it is a sieve.

What makes caviar so special -- what Elyzabeth says is the scientific rationale for extracting oil from one of the world's most expensive delicacies and incorporating it into skin cream -- is its cellular structure, which is strikingly similar to that of skin: 50 to 70 percent water, with a similar percentage breakdown of lipids, protids and trace elements. "When you put caviar essence on your skin, you're giving back life to the cells because of the cellular consistency between skin and caviar," says Elyzabeth. "If you were to graft skin to skin, you would renew the skin. It's that simple."

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