NYC Spa Uses Bird Poop For Facials

Image via Shizuka New York

Looking good means a lot, especially to New Yorkers. One luxury New York City spa is taking it to the next level, offering customers a facial that includes bird poop.

The Japanese spa, Shizuka New York, has about 100 customers enter the salon for the treatment per month. An enyzme in poop keeps the skin smooth, soft and exfoliated. And the mixture, called the Geisha Facial, runs for $180.

I try to bring Japanese beauty secrets to the United States,” owner Shizuka Bernstein told the New York Post. The recipe behind the facial is nothing new to Japanese culture, and Bernstein says she learned how to concoct it from his mother.

That’s why Japanese grandmothers have beautiful complexions,” said Duke Klauck, owner of the Ten Thousand Waves health spa in Santa Fe, NM, which offers a nightingale facial for $129.

The treatment begins with a steaming to open the pores of the skin. After cream is applied, the bird poop follows. A finely grounded cream-colored poop is mixed in with rice bran and applied to the customer’s face with a brush, then with the hands.

Mari Miyoshi, a 35-year-old customer, says that the facial smells like “toasted rice,” adding that, “We don’t do Central Park facials, because those birds eat garbage.”

Bernstein confirmed that only nightingale species of bird poop are used because “they live on seeds, producing the natural enzyme that is the active ingredient.”

And bird poop isn’t the only compromising ingredient applied to the face in the name of beauty. A skin cream from SkinMedica and endorsed by Oprah Winfrey as her “fountain of youth” uses foreskin fibroblast—a piece of human skin used as a culture to grow other skin or cells. There’s also a 24-karat gold facial that costs $500.