For several reasons, newbies getting their first facial at Cecilia Westberry’s compact, all-white Tanglin Mall salon usually find it a slightly confounding experience. It begins with her name. If you’ve never met her, you can almost imagine yourself sitting down to lunch with Martha Stewart and she introduces you to her best friend, Cecilia Westberry.
With a name like that, you’d expect, I don’t know, maybe a tall angular Park Avenue matriarch dressed in her best Halston suit and triple-strand pearls. What you don’t expect is this charming, diminutive Chinese lady with a slightly harried edge, a beguiling elfin smile, and kind eyes that peer all over your face with the same benign scrutiny that Yoda gave Luke Skywalker when they were introduced on Dagobah. The first time I met Cecilia – her husband is American – we were still in a mid-shake of hands when she announced in a soft Singlish accent, “Wah, you have clogged pores! Your skin needs help.
And I have to do something about your eyebrows. How much time do you have?” That last question was alarming in its implication that my dermatological issues were so extensive, they might possibly need a month of intense treatments to sort out. But as I soon learnt, there’s a reason why a loyal troop of Singapore’s beauty mavens, including the sister of a Hollywood celebrity, are devotees who will set aside an Avengers-movie amount of time and show up for a facial with the regularity of homing pigeons.
Because whe.