“I used to drink the Kool-Aid. Fully,” the aesthetician Iván Pol tells me as I lie supine on an organic, custom-made $50,000 Hästens mattress in his serene, beige-and-white Pacific Palisades clinic. “I was 31, doing Botox, retinol,” he continues. Now 45, Pol—who matches the room’s decor in a thin cream sweater from The Row, with a couple of Cartier Love bangles dangling from his wrist—no longer gets injectables, preferring a “very clean, alkaline, holistic way of life.” But his own face remains as smooth and defined as that of the many stars he ministers to: Zoë Kravitz, her visage positively V-shaped while promoting The Batman during the fall collections; Salma Hayek Pinault, her slicked-back hair emphasizing her patrician cheekbones at the House of Gucci premiere in New York; and Laura Harrier, her face as elegantly chiseled as a Greek statue’s at the Met Gala. “I had 16 faces at the Met this year,” the former makeup artist boasts of the high-end clientele that flocks to him for “The Beauty Sandwich,” his proprietary facial method in which he mixes and matches tightening and contouring radio-frequency devices for a tailor-made sculpting treatment that purports to make the face appear sleek, defined, and lifted—“snatched,” in internet parlance.
“I started the trend of snatched skin,” Pol goes on, as he slathers my own face with a generous handful of gooey ultrasound gel, expounding on what he calls “the inverted pyramid of youth”—the slim lower face, defined jaw, and voluminous cheekbones that he had just been flown to the South of France to materialize. I catch Pol as he has returned from St. Tropez, where the entertainment mogul Ari Emanuel wed the designer Sarah Staudinger, to whom Pol gave his special “wedding cake” facial—four “sandwiches” administered over four consecutive days. It’s currently his most popular treatment. “There might have been a little manwich there, too,” he winks, when I ask if Emanuel also enjoyed his services.
But would one of Pol’s treatment offerings be able to streamline the slightly doughy visage of this overworked, never-injected 46-year-old Brooklyn writer-mom? That’s certainly the promise held out by the specter of the new sculpted face—a new new look that is neither too obviously nipped and tucked by the plastic surgeon’s scalpel, nor overinflated and frozen by the dermatologist’s needle, and popularized on social media by a crop of increasingly famous facialists touting noninvasive techniques and commanding quadruple-digit price tags (and lengthy wait lists).
After asking me what I would like to work on—neck, jawline, smile lines, all sagging downward—Pol recommends his “tour de force sandwich,” which takes care of the entire face and neck, and which he offers for $1,500. (At-home appointments, for which his FDA-cleared machines travel with him—whether by car, yacht, or private plane—begin at $2,000.) Working methodically with a slim radio-frequency wand called the Pellevé, Pol exerts a swooping, heated pressure on different parts of my face. After the wand, he switches to another radio-frequency machine, a gun-like hand-held device called the eTwo, which he moves with tiny vacuum-like sucking motions along my jaw, cheekbones, and hairline, lifting the skin further. There are no traces of the services formerly known as facials here—no extractions or mud masks or even moisturizers, save for some “secret sauce,” a hand-blended serum of natural agents Pol has formulated with holistic skin-care specialist Annee de Mamiel that he applies as a final step. I examine myself in the mirror, and I do observe a distinct lift, if not exactly Bella Hadid–level snatching. “Look at the eyebrow!” a friend in her 20s responds, when I send her a selfie. Still got it!
