Filmmaker Janicza Bravo on the Simple Tool That Transformed Her Skin
In the head-spinning age of multistep skin-care routines and mic-drop makeup launches, The One is a space for minimalists to sound off on the single beauty product that’s found a longtime spot in their carefully curated routines.
Janicza Bravo never spent much time looking at herself. That is until 2020, when the pandemic’s onslaught of Zoom meetings forced the Zola and Lemon filmmaker to confront her reflection daily for hours on end. “It made me have different feelings about my face,” she recalls before breaking into a laugh: “Suddenly, I was like, ‘Oh no, what’s happening? Maybe I want to inject my forehead… Should I have buccal fat removal in my cheeks?’”
Instead, Bravo, who has tried to adhere to a clean beauty regimen since reading No More Dirty Looks, turned to a more natural approach after coming across a 2021 video of supermodel Irina Shayk waking up her complexion with little more than ice. It was an aha moment: her grandmother, she remembered, used to plunge her own face into a kitchen sink filled with ice. “At the time, I just thought she was strange and I didn’t ask questions”—but, now, some thirty years later, Bravo herself is a facial-cryotherapy convert.
Though she initially reached for an ice cube straight out of the freezer, she eventually invested in esthetician Nicole Caroline’s sphere-shaped mold. She often refills it with rosewater or fresh aloe juice, gliding it over her skin for 90 seconds every evening (as well as in the morning—on a good day). It’s one of just four products—along with a cleanser, moisturizer, and matte red lipstick by Violette FR—that she brought with her to Grand Cayman, where she is currently finishing her next script in a month-long artist’s residency at Palm Heights. After all, the effects—a tightened complexion, shrunken pores—are too good to leave at home in Los Angeles. As she puts it, “In icing, I realized, ‘I do like my face. The face I have is a good face.’”
Below, shop Janicza Bravo’s The One.
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