Are Custom Facials the New Blowouts? This New Skin-Care Bar Is Betting On It

On a crowded stretch of Lexington Avenue, in the heart of New York’s Upper East Side, a slick facial bar called Silver Mirror will open its flagship today with a singular skin-care concept: to make highly specialized treatments as much a part of your weekly routine as a blowout or manicure.

It was nearly two years ago that Peach & Lily cofounder Cindy Kim left the Korean beauty startup behind to launch Silver Mirror, joining her friend and former Universal Music Group executive Matt Maroone in the venture. “I was itching to do something more brick-and-mortar,” she tells me. As we walk past six white recliners topped with herringbone blankets where the aestheticians are stationed, Kim explains that their skin-care proposal was inspired by her time in Seoul. “There, I would get facials every week—that’s just the thing you do,” she says. Back home, the two sensed a hole in the market—the space between $50 express facials and $300 spa treatments—and set out to fill it.

Think of it as a “skin maintenance shop,” as Maroone calls it, where men and women can come every two to four weeks for a fast, affordable, yet technologically driven session that delivers long-term results—a notch below a trip to the dermatologist. “It should be a part of your lifestyle, just like going to the gym, like getting a manicure,” says Kim of the Korean skin-care ethos. Each of the nine tailored treatments ranges from 30 to 50 minutes and $75 to $130; all begin with microdermabrasion and end with oxygen therapy to seal in the antioxidants. “It’s about getting results,” says aesthetician Brandy Hanley as she sweeps a citrus-scented glycolic peel across my forehead, then tones my cheeks with PureLift, a powerful EMS wand that is exclusive to Silver Mirror in the States. Within an hour, my complexion is clear, lifted, lit from within—and it lasts all week. “We’re no-frills,” Kim says. With skin this good, who needs them?

Silver Mirror, 862 Lexington Avenue, New York; silvermirror.com

 

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