It is a funny thing, keeping a skin diary; by the point you really get around to write down it up a day or two later, your (or, at the very least, my) skin has already returned to its oily, dry, acne-prone established order. Am I being too hard on my natural, God-given face here? Possibly, but you could have to grasp: When you get used to drinking a Hailey Bieber skin glaze smoothie daily for every week, only to have that life-giving juice cruelly stripped away from you once it’s “now not reimbursable by Condé Nast,” it’s mildly difficult to have a look at yourself within the mirror without pondering “Rattling, imagine how way more subtly luminous and hot I could be if I were still quaffing vast quantities of $20 strawberry glaze, collagen and sea moss daily.”

I realize that this cognitive dissonance on my part is a large a part of what the sweetness industry hopes to capitalize on in its ideal consumer, and I’m trying really hard not to have interaction in what Sonya Renee Taylor calls “detriment buying” (i.e. spending money on beauty and/or fashion items I’ll feel like I want but that bring me zero joy and a ton of hassle, like Spanx and even razors, TBH.) That said, when a possibility presented itself to spend one other stretch of time immersing myself wholesale in a beauty-based routine, I could not have said yes faster; to start with, as a Cancer, I thrive in water of any kind, so the thought of ritually plunging myself into the coldest liquid I could find daily for every week appealed to me. (Oh Lord, how young and naive I used to be every week ago.)

While the Erewhon adventure wasn’t exactly something I could replicate by myself (nor would I need to … that strawberry glaze gets to you, man), I used to be interested in trying a variety of cold-plunge options that had developed out of various cultural and spiritual traditions, from a repeated immersion at my favorite Korean spa in L.A. to an especially West-Hollywood-girlie infrared sauna/cold plunge “experience” to a superb old-fashioned bath at home in tepid water made colder by a pair of baggage of ice from the gas station. Below, find all the main points of my (mostly) chill week of cold plunges :

Day One: Monday, August 7

Reference photo of skin before Cold Plunge #1: