Can a Leech Facial Cure My Fear of Leeches?

A few weeks ago, while scrolling idly through spa treatments I couldn’t afford, I encountered the worst thing I have ever heard of in my entire life: leech facials. I’m terrified of leeches. I’ve had actual nightmares about pulling stretchy blood-sucking slugs off my limbs. I avoid swimming in lakes because of this fear, which bums me out, because I’d really like to swim in lakes. Naturally, I called the place immediately—and when I didn’t hear back right away, I left a message with another leech therapist that I found on Google. The second one called me back. I told her the truth: that I hoped a safe, controlled environment would help me conquer my fear for good.

The leech therapist, whose name was Sandra, made a tsk-tsk sound over the phone. “Leeches are intelligent beings,” she told me. “Very sensitive. When people are nervous, leeches pick up on that. You might be on the table for a long time and not even get bitten.”

“You’re covered in your own blood until it dries, and then your skin looks, you know, glowy.”

“Wait,” I said. “For real?”

“For real,” she said. “I had a man who was scared, and the leeches wouldn’t bite. I had to get blood out of his body to entice them. Then they were on his skin, they were sucking the blood, he was yelling and screaming because it’s painful. He bled for hours after that.”

I noted, upon careful introspection, that my phobia of leeches was now significantly worse than it had been 30 seconds earlier. Still, soldiering on, I asked Sandra if she could give me a leech facial.

“I don’t provide facials,” she told me, “but let me tell you what the provider is going to do. They put leeches on your liver area, and then they remove them, and then they put a little bit of alcohol on them and the leeches vomit the blood and they smear the blood on your face. You’re covered in your own blood until it dries, and then your skin looks, you know, glowy.”

“That sounds like a horrible experience,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “For the person, too.”

Sandra has never used leeches for cosmetic purposes; she thinks it’s cruel and ineffective. Mainly, she’s used them to help patients with shingles and hemorrhoids. But after 16 years of leech work, she’s now moved on to focusing on acupuncture and other forms of alternative medicine. The shift was practical; tariffs on European imports made it much harder to get shipments of high-quality medicinal leeches, hirudo medicinalis, so for a while she was ordering from other countries, like Azerbaijan. “Some of these other places were sending leeches with blood in their stomach,” she said. “That to me is a warning: do not use those leeches. You can get an infection with whatever the animal that was used to feed the leech was carrying. If someone tells you that they’re getting leeches from biopharms in Europe, they’re lying. It’s just not possible now.”

I felt weirdly disappointed, and I tried to figure out why. My fear of leeches has actively hindered my ability to do things I love—or that I presume I would love—outdoors. A leech facial sounded awful. But it also seemed approachable and controlled. I’d sit in a reclining chair, surrounded by candles and pleasant music. A kind-faced woman would scoop a leech from a pristine tank, introducing it to me, perhaps by name, before placing it on my leg or my arm, or, dear god, even my face. I would take deep, slow breaths through my nose, calming myself as the creature latched on. Close my eyes, maybe. Become one with the beast. After a while, my heart rate would slow, and I would come to appreciate the experience. Would the leech get warm from my blood? We’d be pals by the end, having endured something distinctly weird together. This seemed a far less intimidating process than wading thigh-deep into muck and emerging spotted with dozens (hundreds?!) of dangly swollen worms.

The historic human-leech bond goes way back. Part of what makes leeches so effective at blood-sucking is that their saliva has uniquely anesthetic and anticoagulant properties, so they’ve been used for thousands of years for folk medicines in Asia and Eastern Europe. Even in modern medicine, the practice isn’t obsolete; doctors sometimes apply live leeches after reconstructive surgery to keep blood from clotting in flaps of tissue. There’s something beautiful to me about this–the reminder that we can’t quite replicate nature, that someone recovering from a precise and controlled nose job, perhaps, might be helped by a leech on the tip of their nose. (Sandra’s practices with leeches lie in a middle ground: as medical devices, leeches haven’t aren’t recommended for shingles and hemorrhoids, but small studies have shown promising results.)

Their segmented bodies merged and contracted, so that the brown patterning on their backs seemed to shimmer in the light. Their pointy faces stretched ahead of them with a sweet, if bloodthirsty, curiosity.

Leech facials, on the other hand? There’s no scientific evidence they work, and plenty of opportunities for things can go wrong, from infections and scarring to allergic reactions. The procedure had a brief pop-culture blip after Victoria’s Secret Model Miranda Kerr discussed leech facials at Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop summit in 2017, but she doesn’t seem to have mentioned them since.

An Instagram account for hirudologist-to-the-stars Irina Brodsky, LA Leeches, has less than 2,0000 followers despite being featured on Botched! and other reality shows; it turns out that people don’t want engorged leeches on rashes and wounds to pop up on their feed. I don’t live near LA, but I reached out to Irina, who’s originally from near Chernobyl and got into alternative medicine after immigrating to the U.S. What would surprise most people about leeches? I asked her. I heard the smile in her voice: “They like to cuddle together.”

Irina reminisced about the different treatments on her Instagram, and I scrolled through, wincing at bloody nostrils, hematomas, a butt crack, the underside of a human tongue. But the leeches themselves were, to my surprise, almost beautiful. Maybe I’d never taken the time to notice before, or maybe I’d been thinking about them so much lately that my knee-jerk revulsion had started to wear off. Their segmented bodies merged and contracted, so that the brown patterning on their backs seemed to shimmer in the light. Their pointy faces stretched ahead of them with a sweet, if bloodthirsty, curiosity.

Perhaps I could find a gentler, more natural way to encounter leeches? After I said goodbye to Irina, I emailed a zoo, an aquarium, a nature center, and a university’s biology department, asking if they had leeches in stock that I could meet, and perhaps an expert who could introduce me to them. (Fishing suppliers often carry leeches as bait, but since it’s winter, they’re out of season.) Each place politely declined. “You understand,” said a naturalist, “that if we had leeches, we’d have to feed them.” This was a point I hadn’t considered. Maybe some creatures–vampiric ones–just aren’t meant to be pets.

My phone rang again. It was the spa that offered leech facials, the first one that I’d reached out to. By now I was having not just second thoughts, but third and fourth ones, too. I wanted to meet a leech, yes–but not just in any circumstances. Leeches were sensitive! They cuddled! I wanted the leech to have a good experience meeting me, too.

Anyway, where did they source their leeches?

“We get them from a biopharm in Europe,” the receptionist told me. Would I like to make an appointment?

Sorry, I told her, but I’d found my own leech source. Come springtime, I’d swim in a lake.