Inside the Met Gala’s Many Facial Suites

It was the week before the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual gala and the facialist Athena Hewitt, in town from California for the event, had no confirmed appointments.

For facialists, the Met Gala is on par with the SuperBowl — a globally televised event wrapped in an irresistible marketing opportunity, especially for fashion brands, increasingly for beauty ones. These pros descend on the city and set up camp in hotel “facial suites” that rotate attendees in and out in the days and then hours leading up to the red carpet, which begins around 2 PM on the first Monday in May.

“You never know who you’re going to do, or what your schedule is going to look like,” said Hewitt, expecting to book between ten and fifteen appointments in the weekend before the “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” exhibit opens to the public.

Skincare is far from the Met Gala’s core focus, but can be a rewarding tie-in — or an expensive gamble, some facialists told The Business of Beauty. While fashion brands trade on the social media chatter they generate from dressing celebrity attendees, facialists crave a different kind of exposure: not to legions of Instagram users, but to VIPs in fashion, media or tech — and their friends.

When the esthetician Mimi Luzon, who flew in from her Tel Aviv headquarters and is on hand for models like Irina Shayk and Ashley Graham, started her esthetics career four decades ago, “it was word of mouth that made you popular or not,” she said. “People say now is the time of social media, but in the end, it’s word of mouth.”

While some luxury labels with beauty imprints, like LVMH‘s Dior, set up suites to service their sponsored attendees and friends of the house, independent brands see them as an investment in exchange for some of the radiance cast off by Vogue’s high-wattage guest list.

“Of course you make money,” said the Mali-born, Paris-based Sophie Carbonari, working her second ever Met Gala. But it’s also about positioning, networking and self-branding, she added: “It puts you on the map.”

Hewitt’s brand Monastery, which mints luxurious botanically-infused skincare products like a rose oil cleanser, sponsored makeup artist Jenn Streicher last year, who worked on Emily Blunt.

“We paid to be on people’s faces,” said Hewitt, who watched the coverage from her home in California’s Bay Area.

After other successful partnerships, like an appearance at Khaite’s fall runway show, Hewitt has decided to upgrade her Met Gala presence. “We’ve become kind of fashion-adjacent,” she said, “and I think of it as fashion’s red carpet.” It was time to get her hands in on the action.

Fashion’s Red Carpet

When Joanna Czech began working the gala 22 years ago, as the appointed beautician for Anna Wintour and her family, it was an altogether less beautiful affair. There were no teams of beauty pros, but a trusted few who took care of all cosmetic fronts for VIP guests, from hair to toes.

“We did their skin, nails, everything,” said Czech, who has returned for the event just about every year since. Now with a bigger team and a higher profile herself, Czech sees clients at her downtown SoHo studio, and this weekend will prep 20 attendees, including Wintour, Sabrina Carpenter and Hailey Bieber. She estimates her schedule comprises “at least 5 percent of seated guests.”

Most Met Gala facial suites materialise either at the stately Carlyle and the fashion-forward Mark, which, owing to their proximity to the museum, become hives of activity for gala guests and those who work on them. They’re only getting buzzier. This year, for the first time, the Mark is putting a press riser out front so outlets like E! News can broadcast guest departures.

Dior’s facial suite at The Mark, where such rooms cost around $2500 a night, is staffed for the third year in a row by the Washington DC-based esthetician Sarah Akram, dressed in a flawless cotton poplin dress and Dior slingbacks.

For facialists, the suite “is about exposure,” Akram, a Dior spokesperson, said. For the brand, it’s “to solidify our position in a very crowded luxury skincare space.”

Some brands broker terms before booking treatments. Agencies that represent beauty artists, like The Wall Group, will blast their client rosters to publicists who represent brands for potential sponsorship. (“Wanted to share our available opportunities,” read one email, seeking a hair tool sponsor for Emma Chamberlain.) From cosmetics to blowdryers, celebrity beauty professionals and their agents net tens of thousands of dollars just from Met Gala-related beauty partnerships, the terms of which usually encompass accepting free product and services in exchange for Instagram reposts and name-drop blessing.

Carbonari flew to New York last Friday for her second ever gala, where she’s posting up at the Fifth Avenue Hotel to tend to attendees including Tracee Ellis Ross. Her signature treatment — an hour of manual fascia expression in which the skin audible crackles — costs $1500. She is one of the few facial suites charging her VIP clients full price for her services.

More recently, the Met Gala is “usually about sponsorship,” Czech said. “We live in new times.” Her 2025 facial suite is supported by the UK-based Lyma Life, and its latest $6000 laser device, along with the skincare label Swiss Perfection.

With the benefit of Hewitt’s brand-new residency at the Chelsea Hotel, Monastery forewent paid sponsorships in favour of complimentary treatments, and aims to make a “more tangible” impact, she said. For their part, facialists are one of the few members of the celebrity industrial complex able to facilitate a relaxing, undemanding environment for high-profile guests before they set foot on the worldwide stage. And a facial provides, if nothing else, time for a short nap.

“Some of them need it,” Hewitt said.

Un-Met Potential

The best time to get a Met Gala facial is Monday morning, every facialist said. The techniques most frequently used, like microcurrent — which uses electricity to stimulate facial muscles — or lymphatic drainage massage provide instant visible effects that fade at Cinderella speed.

Skincare’s relative low priority to other matters, like getting dressed, means that appointments are subject to last minute cancellations, but need to be strategically timed owing to the transience of their benefits. “Everybody wants to glow at the last minute,” Luzon said.

Celebrities, the lynchpin between brands and millions of dollars of exposure to consumers, can be a tricky relationship for facialists to manage themselves. “It’s delicate, and intimate,” said Carbonari. One pro mentioned how a longtime client and A-list actress tagged a rival facialist in a rogue Instagram story, forever associating the two. Some now employ social teams that broker coverage in exchange for treatments.

“For many years, I did a lot of VIPs, and I didn’t care about the press,” said Luzon; that changed about a decade ago, when she began doing the Met Gala and launched her own line of products. For a certain class of estheticians, celebrity clients aren’t just good for business but its very fuel, powering its marketing tales, press coverage, product launches and future facial suites.

Carbonari is sure she’d have “much more success” if she was bolder about asking to post her celebrity clients. “Sometimes I ask the team, ‘Can I put [a post] in my Instagram Stories? And then it’s just there for 24 hours.” She laughed. “I just prefer to have no expectation.”

In the end, Hewitt’s schedule filled out, as she expected; by Monday morning, she will have sculpted the cheeks of Instagram chief executive Adam Mosseri, his wife Monica Mosseri and at least one breakout pop star, using gossamer microcurrents to tighten their facial muscles toward camera-ready perfection. (Hewitt asked not to print the musician’s name, as its a new relationship.) The ideal scenario, she said, is that one of them makes headlines on Tuesday for their unprecedentedly radiant skin.

“People would be like, ‘What serum is she wearing?’” Hewitt joked. “That perfect scenario has not happened. But someday, someday…”

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