Why your skin peels after a facial - and why that’s the point

Spicules are microscopic silica needles. They’re harvested from freshwater sponges, then dried, milled and graded. What ends up in the jar is a consistent length rather than a lucky dip. Under a microscope they look like glass splinters. Broadly speaking, that’s what they are.

During the treatment I work them into the skin by hand, in one direction, for a set length of time. They lodge in the stratum corneum: the outermost layer, the one made of cells that have already finished their working life. They aren’t injected and they don’t reach the dermis. Nothing goes deeper than the layer that was on its way off anyway.

You’ll feel them. Most people describe a prickle that builds over the first few minutes and then settles into warmth. It isn’t painful. It’s a genuinely strange sensation, and I always say so before you lie down.

Skin renews itself on a cycle. Roughly twenty-eight days in your twenties, and slower from there. Forty-five or fifty days is common by your fifties. That slowing is a large part of why mature skin looks flat. Dead cells sit on the surface longer and scatter light instead of reflecting it.

A spicule treatment interrupts the cycle. The micro-channels provoke a repair response, and the surface layer is pushed off early. That takes a couple of days to become visible. Day one and two, you’ll usually feel tight and look slightly flushed. Day three the flaking starts, normally around the nose and chin first. Day four or five is the peak. By day six or seven most people are through it.

How much you shed varies enormously, and it doesn’t track with how well the treatment worked. Some people peel in sheets. Some barely flake at all and still tell me their make-up sits differently a fortnight later. I stopped trying to predict it years ago.

Peeling is a side effect of the mechanism. It’s not a measure of how well the treatment worked, and the two are related more loosely than people assume.

It isn’t a chemical peel. Nothing is dissolving the bonds between cells. The exfoliation is mechanical, and it happens inside the layer rather than on top of it.

It isn’t a reaction. Flaking, mild tightness in the shower on day two, and pinkness for a couple of days: that’s the expected course. Blistering, weeping, swelling, or heat and redness that spreads isn’t, and I want to hear from you the same day. In twenty years it’s been rare, and it’s always turned out to be a condition nobody had picked up.

And it isn’t something to have the week of an event. Ten days’ clearance at minimum. Three weeks if it’s your own wedding.

I turn this treatment down more often than I perform it. A treatment menu can’t tell you that. The list is short, and I don’t negotiate with it.

• Anyone with active rosacea, eczema or perioral dermatitis. The barrier is already struggling and this asks a great deal of it.
• Anyone who has had a peel, laser or microneedling in the past four weeks.
• Anyone using a prescription retinoid who hasn’t been able to stop it for a fortnight beforehand.
• Anyone with a skin infection on the face, including a cold sore that’s threatening to appear.
• Anyone who can’t give up a week to looking flaky. Not a clinical reason, but a real one, and I’d rather ask than assume.

Do considerably less than you think. A gentle cleanser, one barrier moisturiser, and a high-factor sunscreen every morning without exception. The skin arriving underneath is more vulnerable to UV than usual. This is the fortnight where sun exposure quietly undoes the work.

Don’t pick, and don’t help it along with a flannel, a scrub or a cleansing brush. Skin pulled off before it’s ready leaves a mark, and I see that far more often than any problem with the treatment itself. If a flake is hanging, trim it. Don’t lift it.

Men, in particular: don’t shave through the peak. Wait until the surface is smooth again, even if that means three days of looking unshaven in meetings.

Texture, mostly. This is what I reach for when skin feels rough rather than looks wrong. Congestion across the cheeks. The fine bumpy surface left behind by years of breakouts. The shallow irregularity that makes foundation sit badly by lunchtime.

It also helps the appearance of shallow scarring, and I want to be careful about that sentence. Indentation left by acne responds better to a course of microneedling, and I’d say so in the room. Spicules improve the surface. They don’t rebuild what was lost underneath it.

One treatment does something. Three or four, spaced four to six weeks apart, does considerably more. I don’t sell courses at the door. Have one, live with it for a month, and decide for yourself.