I am on the phone trying to book a special appointment: a foreskin facial. The treatment is not widely available in the US, so the calls yield nothing except a series of confusing conversations.

“Do you do a foreskin facial?” I ask a facialist at one New York salon.

“We do a four-step facial called HydraFacial,” she says.

“Does it have foreskin in it?” I say, a bit louder than before.

“Well it has four steps. First, we ...”

“Sorry, I hate to labor the point – but does it actually contain foreskin?”

“I don’t know what you mean. Foreskin?”

“Yes. Like on the end of a penis?”

“Oh no, we don’t do it there. We only treat the face.”

“No, I get that – but does the facial ingredient contain foreskin?”

“No. Goodbye.”

The procedure, popular in Hollywood celebrity circles, injects cells from a baby’s foreskin – specifically a South Korean baby’s foreskin – into the face. Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett are big fans. Just last month Kate Beckinsale had one, and said it was “amazing”. I was curious.

After a couple of false starts, I snag an appointment at the Georgia Louise Atelier salon, in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where they prefer to call the foreskin facial the “Hollywood EGF facial”. It costs $650, plus tip, and mine is being administered by a woman called Sarah.

I’d been looking forward to it: the facial is supposed to reduce wrinkles and improve skin tone. As a 17-year-old in Preston, Lancashire, I was fresh-faced enough to have to borrow my friend Martin’s driver’s license to get into Tokyo Jo’s nightclub. But 16 years on, I’m aware of crow’s feet around my eyes and a crease between my brows. I was not aware of wrinkles stretching from my nose to the corners of my mouth, but Sarah assures me I have those, too.

‘In the meantime, friends and acquaintances monitor my face for evidence of improvements.’ Photograph: Ali Smith

Now I’m here, I’m nervous. I’m also feeling nauseous, owing to some enthusiastically prepared but dubiously cooked beef ribs I ate last night. When Sarah, preparing creams and clothes somewhere behind me, starts talking about skin peels and secret serums, my stomach begins to rumble.

Sarah pops up close to my face to show me the tool that’ll pump the foreskin formula into my skin. It’s 12 needles, tightly packed in a little circle, attached to some sort of electronic device.

Soon, I’m having cream slathered on my face while soft music wafts in the background. Sarah announces that she is doing a peel, and once that’s done, she sticks goggles on me and shines a blue light in my face.

The key to the foreskin facial is using epidermal growth factors, or EGF, which in this case come from cells from a newborn baby’s foreskin. EGF, according to Georgia Louise Atelier, helps to “generate collagen and elastin”. By having the cells injected into the face, you can get the collagen and elastin deeper into the skin, where it can do its best work.

Sarah smears the foreskin formula on to my face and neck. (She doesn’t normally do the neck, but they can’t work through my beard, so the extra goop goes there.) Then the needle gun is fired up, quite close to my ear, and Sarah gets to work jabbing me.

“Oh, you’re bleeding,” she says at one point, as casually as you might tell someone they’ve got lint on their sweater. I’ve been numbed, so the needles don’t hurt, but the tool sounds unnervingly like a tattoo gun, and the thought crosses my mind that Sarah is giving me some impromptu and unwanted face art.

But she isn’t. Once the blood is dabbed off, I’m slathered in a final batch of seaweed-smelling cream and we’re done. I look in the mirror. My face is very red and very shiny. On my neck there are red blotches from where the needles have done their work. It looks like I’ve been suction-cupped.

Georgia Louise, the establishment’s owner, declined an interview, which meant I was unable to ask why she specifically uses foreskins from South Korean babies. When I asked Sarah the same question, she said South Korea tends to be ahead of the curve with beauty treatments, and this treatment had been inspired by work there.

When I step out of the salon – after turning down their offer to buy some healing cream for $54 – my face feels tight and raw, as if I’ve been slapped. The final batch of cream Sarah had put on my face, the one that smelled like seaweed, hadn’t been quite so pungent in the salon. But as it starts to dry, and as the wind whistles down the street, wafting the scent from cheek to nostril, there it is: semen.

It’s not just a hint. It’s a proper smell of semen. Later, on the subway, I’m worried it will put someone off their dinner.

It takes a couple of days for the redness to die down. I’ve been told to avoid hot yoga, which doesn’t pose much of a problem, and to avoid the sun. It could take days or weeks for the foreskin cells to work their magic.

In the meantime, friends and acquaintances monitor my face for evidence of improvements. Two people say my crow’s feet have gone. A colleague mauls my cheek and tells me my skin is soft. A guy I know in a bar says I have “a glow”, but I take it with a pinch of salt as he falls off his chair 20 minutes later.

The main difference is people want to talk to me more than usual, if only about foreskins, and relative strangers keep touching my face.

Personally I can’t see much difference. If anything, staring endlessly in the mirror, looking for changes, has made me more self-conscious about my face. I notice one of my eyes doesn’t open properly. My nose is bent. There’s a lump on my lip from where someone punched me – on one of those nights that I used Martin’s ID to get into Tokyo Jo’s.

Perhaps there’s a lesson in that. Maybe we shouldn’t try to defy our age.﻿