Take a look around. There’s a thin layer of snow on rooftops, condo balconies are lit with the gentle glow of multi-coloured LEDS, and Natalie Cole is playing everywhere they sell anything… We all know what that means: ’tis the season for dry, uncomfortable, unbalanced skin.
Admittedly, perhaps that’s a Scrooge-esque ways of looking at this “most wonderful time of the year” but let’s get real for a second. Between the desert-dry air outside, them harsh winter winds, and your work heater blasting more hot air than your drunk colleague hitting on the intern at the holiday party, your skin never stood a chance. This year, treat yo’self and your face to the gift that keeps on giving.
Dermalogica, at 720 King Street West, offers the kind of services that you need to have radiant, glowing skin all through the harsh Canadian winter. One of only 37 locations in the world, the Dermalogica brand has become the gold-standard in postgraduate skin and body therapy over the last 30 years. The main tenant of their philosophy has been to treat skin as a health issue as opposed to a beauty one. With no products fitting directly into this pragmatic and sensible mold, International Dermal Institute founder Jane Wurwand decided to start her own line and thus, Dermalogica.
Dermalogica products are made without the irritants and ingredients that often cause breakouts (we’re looking at you lanolin, SD alcohol, mineral oil, artificial colours and fragrances) and instead actually improve your skin’s health. Also, are only available from IDI-trained skin therapy professionals. We lucky Torontonians have an IDI in the city so we can experience an amazing Dermalogica skin treatment right from the source. While you may think this is something like a spa facial… it really is nothing like a spa facial. There’s very little pampering, beauty, or luxury involved (note: this does not mean you still don’t leave feeling totally relaxed and rejuvenated, bear with me). Instead, the treatment begins with a questionnaire about your current medical, beauty, and consumption patterns. Then you lay back on the reclining chair and your skin therapist begins with a mapping of your face, ears, and neck into 14 separate zones. As they’re doing this, they go over what your problem areas are with you and figure out a plan to treat them, zone by zone. This differs greatly from a typical spa experience, where usually there is very little communication and mostly silence excluding the CD playing whale mating calls. Also, the treatment plan that is developed over the course of the mapping is totally customized to your face and its needs, as opposed to some cookie-cutter cucumber/coconut milk/ whatever spread.
Following this mapping and “diagnosis” (let’s use health terms because, really, it is a health treatment), your skin therapist creates a treatment plan and treats you right on the spot. Oh yes, and don’t forget lots of über-comforting hot compresses and massaging. But nothing too frilly. Remember, we have a bare bones philosophy to follow here people. Following the skin treatment (it lasts about an hour), you are given a face-mapping prescription sheet with an example face mapped out into the 14 zones, a list of products to use, when to use them (AM/PM), and which zones to use them on. It’s pretty amazing and pretty much impossible to screw up.
If this sounds appealing to you, you’re probably an intelligent person. Most spa facials have you glowing for a day or two before stress, coffee, winter, and the TTC have you back to a haggard looking hot mess. After a Dermalogica Skin Treatment, you will be glowing and will continue to glow because the skin therapist knows what they’re doing and, in turn, can give you the knowledge and products you need to stay beautiful yourself.
