Punching Day: FaceGym 🌭

I used to think the perfect job was the person at the top of a waterslide who tells people when to go. You get to experience godlike power over another human being’s life for a small amount of time with very little consequence if you do a bad job. However, you probably have to clean up a small child’s fear vomit sometimes. The point is, there’s a downside to everything; no job is perfect, except for the job where rich people pay you to slap them in the face. 

The woman doing the slapping in that video has the best job in the world. She works at a place called FaceGym, where slapping rich people isn’t just allowed; it’s a job requirement. 

FaceGym is a growing UK skincare brand selling a specialized face slapping technique that I was sure must have been done in by the pandemic. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but something about it didn’t seem pandemic friendly to me. Maybe it’s the fact that their version of skincare is having someone grease up their fingers and rub them all over your mouth and nose.

I’m sorry if I made it sound like they JUST slap you in the face earlier. That diminishes the scope of what FaceGym provides. They also have a service wherein someone wraps their arms around your neck and puts you in a sleeper hold. They call that move the Ichabod Crane. You can’t be ugly if you don’t have a head. They’ll see if they can pop that bad boy right off for you.

The idea behind FaceGym is that by exercising the muscles in your face you can sculpt them to prevent wrinkles without any kind of invasive surgery. That’s right, it’s totally noninvasive! It’s simply painful for other reasons! You can buy FaceGym products online, or you can go into a store where for around a hundred and twenty dollars, one of their employees will smack you around for fifty full minutes. 

I feel like now that Botox is widely available enough that even my middle class midwestern aunts can afford it, rich people have to resort to wilder and wilder methods of preventing visible signs of aging. Inge Theron, the woman who created FaceGym, loves to push how natural and body-positive the process of slapping your face fat around until you’re perfectly smooth is. Last year, she told Forbes magazine, “My message is this: you’re already great, but let’s see how we can make you even better.” One of the natural beauty methods FaceGym uses is putting women in a Hannibal Lecter mask that will electrocute them.

You too can get the smooth, wrinkle-free complexion of Uncle Fester from the Addams Family with this four hundred and fifteen dollar device designed to give an instant lift to your complexion. Your face will be up so high after you introduce enough electricity to it naturally. 

Inge Theron is a former journalist who covered the beauty and wellness beat. She claims the idea for FaceGym came to her after three years of travel and research. She says she “worked with fitness instructors, dermatologists, facial therapists, and even a Mexican shaman to align ancient wisdom with modern technologies.” I thought the most ancient wisdom we have as a society is not to pay someone a hundred and twenty dollars to slap you in the face, regardless of how dripping wet their hands are.

I know there are plenty of other things that people do to their bodies in the name of beauty that look dorky as hell. There’s a medical procedure called a Brazilian butt lift that’s so popular Amazon sells multiple inflatable beds with recovery butt holes in them so your butt can properly heal post butt-perfecting surgery.

Red light therapy masks are also very popular right now, and they look like misplaced horror movie props that no one was willing to tell Gwyneth Paltrow she’d mistaken for skincare. Everyone understands they look nightmarish, but no one is willing to stop using them for that reason alone. One of these masks could latch onto a face and pull it to hell every full moon, but if you made a case for it being 15% more effective than lotion alone, women would take that chance. Personally, I’d be willing to deal with one to two blood filled elevators, some lights flickering, and the occasional disembodied laughter of a ghost child but not for anything less than twenty percent better visible results.

FaceGym seems extra dumb to me because I have a theory that how much something sucks is directly tied to how branded it is. For instance, if you walk into a restaurant and you’re greeted by a man in a pirate hat who tells you that you “arrrrrr about to have some amazin’ fish and chips,” you’re about to eat the worst goddamn fish and chips you’ve had in your entire life. If the fish and chips were good, you wouldn’t have to sacrifice a man’s dignity to get me into the restaurant. The same principle applies to skincare. 

If the facials were good, FaceGym probably wouldn’t have all of their employees dress like personal trainers in workout pants and tank tops. They wouldn’t have you put on an unnecessary little sweatband to start your face workout, and they wouldn’t have a tiny branded exercise ball you rub on your face because it’s something you would see at the gym but tiny for FaceGym!

When FaceGym was founded in 2015, there was a move toward natural beauty, which meant very expensive unnatural things that made you look so good it didn’t seem like you paid money to have them done. Inge Theron was jumping on that trend, but it looks like over time, what she learned is that people don’t want to feel naturally beautiful. They’re more into getting a series of tiny shocks from metal sloth fingers as they gently glide across your face. 

Or maybe having your skin flavor-blasted to hell by a jet-powered puff of air and various serums they keep in an IV bag for some reason? I’m sure it’s a holistic IV bag made from the skin of organic soup and beeswax with a hint of mountain spring water filtered through the tear ducts of an endangered elephant (who was made to cry through all natural means). 

You might be wondering how this moist, mucous membrane-smearing business made it through the pandemic. FaceGym managed to survive while other skin care specialists closed down because, it turns out, people who FaceGym are more than willing to pay for exclusive online classes to learn how to slap themselves in the face at home. 

This is a still from FaceGym’s Instagram page, showing off their outdoor class. An instructor is teaching these women how to do the old greasy slap. Sorry, I’m being told I can’t call it that because FaceGym has trademarked the term Old Greasy Slap™. It’s their newest treatment! It’s administered in the alley behind the FaceGym by a woman going through a painful divorce and you have to wear a mask that looks just like her ex’s face. It costs nine hundred dollars, but for an extra three fifty she’ll also electrocute you. God, I want to work at FaceGym.