Fish Kiss

When I wrote about the Anti-aging Ick Factor almost a year ago, I never dreamed that I would personally ever participate in any such ickiness. But there I was strolling down Strøget, Copenhagen’s assertively commercial, seemingly endless pedestrian street when I passed a place called Fish Kiss Spa. I assumed it was an unfortunate translation and had nothing to do with actual fish, or kissing, neither of which seemed spa-related.  In Stockholm I had noticed a furniture studio with the unfortunate name, Acne. So why not Fish Kiss?

I walked in.

It turned out to be a small room lined with fifteen large fish tanks positioned on a long low ledge that ran under fifteen throne chairs. Not actually thrones but the kind of oversized, quasi-fancy seats you find in upscale pedicure places. Six or seven women were sitting on these throne chairs with their legs submerged in the fish tanks.

And what was in the fish tanks you are wondering? Well, fish, of course, small, dark fish, maybe an inch long. Each tank had perhaps a hundred or so of these fish. It was hard to make an accurate count as most of them were attached to the feet and legs of the women. They were, in fact, nibbling at the skin of the feet and legs of these women.

These fish, the salon attendant told me, were special dead-skin-eating fish from Turkey. They had no teeth. They attached themselves to your submerged parts and… well, ate at you by a combination of gumming and sucking. This process of exfoliation was supposed to make your skin smooth, increase circulation and rejuvenate (as in make young) your feet. “It feels a little weird at first,” the salon lady told me.

Had I not been on vacation, had I not just walked close to 20 miles, much of it on ankle-twisting cobble stone, had I not made the mistake of wearing 15-year-old Chacos with seriously worn webbing, had my husband not dared me…I would have swum right by Fish Kiss Spa.

I didn’t.

You can gauge the level of enjoyment I derived from that experience from the photos I’m including here. The spa woman who told me it would feel “weird” at first, said after you got used to it, it would be “relaxing.” Apparently, I never got used to it. Do you remember how it felt when you were a kid and you went swimming in some murky lake and minnows darted around your legs and you screamed? That’s how it felt. Only worse and for 20 minutes. (Hey, I paid for 20 minutes, I was going to get 20 minutes.)

Did the treatment turn back the feet of time (sorry, I couldn’t’ resist). Nope. My feet looked like the same slightly scaly, well used, in severe need of a pedicure feet they were when I walked into Fish Spa.

But I did walk 18 miles the next day.