Original article by: MENG JIN, Vogue
WHEN I WAS A CHILD I spent many sweltering summers in my aunt’s Shanghai apartment, which had one air-conditioning unit that was only turned on for the hottest hour of the afternoon. Unused to the heat, I was often weak and nauseated. To assess my health, my aunt would palm my forehead and check my tongue for changes in color and shape. Then she’d clear the hair from the back of my neck and, with a spoon—or more often, her knuckles—press and pull at my skin until a reddish-purple mark appeared. I was suffering from heatstroke, she said, and this friction would draw out the toxins that were making me feel sick. The darker the resulting welts, according to her, the more bad energy had been released.
I had a similar reaction when I recently discovered the heavily trafficked gua sha hashtag on Instagram, a feed featuring smooth, pore-less faces, not only unmarked but supposedly de-puffed and contoured. Missing from these images were soup spoons or hardened knuckles; in their place were elegant facial rollers and flat, grooved tools made of jade, rose quartz, and other divinely polished stones—the practice I associated with pain now rebranded as a soothing, meditative, and even luxurious experience.
Why was I (and most Chinese people I know) just now hearing about these “ancient Chinese beauty tools,” as they’re frequently billed online? Was facial gua sha—which has been put through the woo-woo wellness spin cycle, really the chosen beauty routine of ancient Chinese princesses—another piece of internet lore? “Well, that is false. It’s marketing,” explains Ping Zhang, DOM, L.Ac, a New York–based traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) guru and a pioneering acupuncturist in the field of facial rejuvenation. “Gua sha was originally used for two conditions: the abrupt, immediate, sudden collapse of the body from heatstroke”—my aunt was onto something— “and seasonal diseases, like a cold virus.” Zhang goes on to describe how traditionally, gua sha could be performed with whatever tool was on hand—an animal bone or horn, a soup spoon, a coin—and was often used as far back as the Yuan Dynasty to revive farmers who collapsed with exhaustion from working under the hot sun.
At the Paris-based atelier of acupuncturist Elaine Huntzinger, gua sha facials were one of the most sought-after appointments during the spring collections. “My whole face feels different, like, all of the tension is gone in my jaw,” Eva Chen, the director of fashion partnerships at Instagram and a vocal Huntzinger supporter, posted pre-Balenciaga. Canada-born with family roots in Hong Kong, Huntzinger was raised on TCM. After her mother’s death, she found herself drawn back to the home remedies she grew up with, driven partially by a desire to find a solution for her own eczema, which had not responded to cortisone or antibiotics. Her skin finally cleared up when she started to address her diet and lifestyle, but also her grief. “In Chinese medicine, you learn the root of what’s causing your imbalance with emotional issues,” she says. She brings these lessons to her treatments, which begin with a 20-minute consultation to determine physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Like my aunt, Huntzinger also looks at people’s tongues as a portal to other system imbalances; like her own mother, she leaves them with food recommendations to rebalance qi—energy flow—all of which contributes to a toned, radiant complexion.
This emphasis on a top-to-toe approach is a nod to a somewhat obvious philosophy that is only beginning to gain traction in the beauty industry: “The skin is a map for what’s going on in the body,” explains Katie Woods, a Bay Area–based esthetician and the owner of Ritual SF, a San Francisco face-massage studio offering bespoke facials that incorporate gua sha tools and techniques. Before even entering the treatment room, I have to fill out two pages of paperwork covering everything from my menstrual cycle to my bowel movements, a line of questioning that is more comprehensive than many conversations I’ve had with my primary-care physician. The customized experience begins with an edible honey-and-berry mask that Woods prepares on the spot—“Your skin loved that,” she says as she wipes it off—and includes a deeply relaxing gua sha interlude administered with cooling spoons and stone tools of all shapes and sizes.
When I catch a glimpse of myself post-treatment, my face is bright and clean, its natural lines defined as if the angle of my jaw and the plane of my cheek have been sculpted anew. And I feel oddly drained—in a good way. “You can do it once a week,” says Portland, Oregon–based licensed acupuncturist Beth Griffing Russell, speaking to a big part of #guasha’s 21st-century viral appeal: Unlike with Botox, these results can be replicated at home. Griffing Russell emphasizes that home gua sha enthusiasts should not neglect the neck. “Flick up,” she instructs, moving her gua sha tool from one ear to another and around the base of the skull to stimulate the muscle that connects the back of your head “to the wrinkles in your forehead.”
A few days later I try the no-frills version to alleviate some persistent tension and fatigue at Oakland Foot Health Center, a walk-in storefront not dissimilar to the medical-massage clinics in China serving working-class men on their lunch breaks, aunties, grandmas, and, once upon a time, me. “Gua sha has saved many peasants’ lives,” my masseuse tells me in Mandarin as she scrapes my back during an hour of body acupressure with gua sha, which goes for a modest $60. When I ask what her tool is made of, she chuckles. “It’s supposed to be ox horn, but it looks like plastic to me.” I leave with the same drained lightness coursing throughout my body that I felt after my experience at Ritual SF.
So why, I wonder, would I pay $285 to visit Crystal Cave LA, a “healing hut” in Santa Monica where Julie Civiello Polier performs her much-blogged about “shamanic” gua sha facials three days a week? Described as “a meditative journey and intuitive reading,” the whole concept makes me laugh before I even arrive. “I love how gua sha gives us a tool that is charged by the person using it and the person receiving it,” Civiello Polier—a petite blonde former actor—tells me of her popular treatment’s purported energy exchange. At least I’ll get a nice nap out of this, I think to myself as I close my eyes.
But when Civiello Polier places crystals on my various chakras—including an amethyst at my feet that she claims “wants to go home” with me—I do feel something, a deep radiating warmth that allows my overthinking mind to let go. As she performs the facial gua sha, at one point even sticking her fingers inside my mouth for a deep, tension-relieving buccal massage, she takes long audible breaths that lull me into an ASMR-like trance. Afterward, my skin does not look totally transformed. “There’s a limitation to the results you can get with gua sha,” confirms Julia Tzu, M.D., a clinical assistant professor at NYU’s Ronald O. Perelman Department of Dermatology, who recommends fillers, such as Restylane Lyft, for longer-lasting tightening. But a superficial result seems besides the point; I feel like I’ve been lifted from the inside out.
I step out of Civiello Polier’s studio into the bright Southern California sun, conflicted by the commodification of Chinese folk medicine and home remedies. But the craving for a more holistic conception of beauty feels real. I remember something Huntzinger told me when describing her work. “These days, society is so yang, so active. With the advent of social media, the yang has been overstimulated to such a degree, and the yin has not been nourished,” she explains. Maybe, in a paradoxical twist, #guasha has risen precisely from our innate desire to restore focus on the yin—the darker, interior, reflective parts of ourselves.
“People are not just getting a skin-deep treatment,” Zhang confirms of what she sees as the technique’s actual rejuvenating benefits. She slips into Chinese for a moment for emphasis, and I notice that in place of “antiaging” she uses the words yang sheng—a phrase I’ve heard often from my aunts and grandmothers when telling me to take care. Remembering how the Chinese women in my life have always emphasized that to be healthy is to be beautiful, Zhang’s message suddenly makes sense. After all, I’d never thought of yang sheng as simply utilitarian: It translates more directly to “nourishing life.”
