Go niche

How far would you go to look gorgeous? When it comes to beauty treatments there seems to be no limit.

For example, one of the most popular – and expensive – treatments available at Shizuka, a day spa in Manhattan run by “celebrity facialist” Shizuka Bernstein, is the bird-poo facial. For a couple of hundred euro you can get excrement of nightingale to rejuvenate your skin.

It’s just one of the wonders available in spas around the world – and is only trotting behind salons in Beverly Hills and Dubai where facials that use human placentas, apparently gleaned from Russian maternity wards, are the latest must-have.

Israel has a spa that specialises in snake massages, in which a knot of the creatures is dumped on your back or tummy, in the belief that their writhing works like a (snake) charm.

But of all the icky treatments out there, it’s hard to beat that offered by Hari’s, the hip hair and beauty salon in London, where bull semen is used in one of its hair treatments. Not just the seed of any bull, but that of organic Aberdeen Angus. “Viagra for hair”, it is meant to transform tired hair into the kind of silken tresses worthy of anyone bovine enough to request it.