The first gua sha month

I bought the gua sha on a Tuesday afternoon in a small shop in the Latin Quarter, mostly because the woman in the shop made it sound less complicated than I had assumed. It cost twenty-two euros and came in a small velvet pouch. The stone is jade, the colour of pond water, and it has a wing-like shape that fits the curve of the cheekbone surprisingly well.

I had read about gua sha for years and assumed it would be a project — that it would require a course, or at least a half-dozen YouTube tutorials, and probably some special oil. I made the decision, walking home with it in my coat pocket, that I would not study it. I would just put a few drops of the face oil I already owned onto my skin in the evening, and I would move the stone across my face slowly, and I would see what happened.

The first week

I did not look any different. I was disappointed. The internet had suggested I would, by the end of the week, look like a woman in a wellness advertisement. I did not. My face looked exactly like my face, possibly with slightly pinker cheeks for the ten minutes after the practice, possibly not — it was hard to tell. I kept going only because the practice itself was pleasant.

The second week

I started to like the ten minutes. The slow movement of the stone across the face, the cool feel of the jade, the slight pressure under the jaw and along the side of the neck — none of this was producing visible results, but the ten minutes had become a small evening pause I looked forward to. The face cream I had owned for two years was suddenly being used every night, because I needed something to glide the stone across.

The third week

I noticed, on a Tuesday morning, that the small puffiness I had carried under my eyes for most of my adult life was gone. Not less. Gone. I checked twice. The face that looked back from the mirror was the face I had been used to but with something around the eyes opened up. Whether this was lymphatic drainage, as the woman in the shop had suggested, or simply a change in how I was sleeping that month, I could not say. But the puffiness was gone.

The fourth week and onward

I have not, in the three years since, missed more than three or four nights of the practice. The face I have now is not a different face from the face I had four years ago. It is the same face, perhaps with slightly more definition along the jaw, perhaps not. What has changed is more about the relationship — the ten minutes a day spent moving slowly across my own face has produced a small ongoing attentiveness that has, I think, propagated outward to a lot of the rest of how I treat the body. The stone was the small object that taught me a larger habit, and twenty-two euros has turned out to be one of the better investments I have made in a body I expect to live in for some decades more.