Would You Pay $1,800 for a Facial?

Ms. Czech, an aesthetician trained in Eastern European facial massage, compares skin to dough that one can knead, mold and manipulate manually. Her experience proved prescient; she has worked on the faces of Kim Kardashian, Hailey Bieber and Jennifer Aniston, and, in March, she will open a third spa in Los Angeles. (The other two are in New York and Dallas.)

Ms. Greene, the founder of Crystal Greene Studio in SoHo, practices a similar method. La Sculpture, a manual facial priced at $525 for 60 minutes, makes up nearly 85 percent of her treatments, she said. In February she is introducing a souped-up version: 90 minutes of manual massage, microcurrent and buccal massage, in which she goes inside the mouth to help sculpt the jawline. It will cost $750.

People may be more aware these days, but social media, where Instagram and TikTok birth trends overnight, remains the most powerful manipulator of beauty standards. The “new facial” could be seen as a backlash to the cyborgian “Instagram face” that dominated our feeds in the last few years.

“Pumped and plumped,” Mr. Pol described the aesthetic that, he said, is passé.

Mr. Pol, a former makeup artist, is the founder of the Beauty Sandwich, the name of both a radio frequency-centric facial that costs $1,600 ($1,800 for the first session) with, he said, a yearlong waiting list, and a skin-care line that sells a Secret Sauce, $295, and a Snatching Sauce, $250. The products are not serums, Mr. Pol said, but rather a “new category of skin care — a sauce.” (If one had to guess, “serum” would probably still be the correct classification.)

Last summer, Tea Hacic-Vlahovic, a novelist and podcast host, tried a FaceGym “workout,” as it calls its facials. Midway, her facialist showed her the half of the face she had treated.

“It was a big difference,” Ms. Hacic-Vlahovic said. “Half of my face looked like I had a face lift.” The lift lasted for a few days, she said.