"You can put whatever you want on your face, but if you don't clean your face regularly with facials, nothing -- and I mean nothing -- will work." Elyzabeth leans forward while a coterie of well-coifed aestheticians busily work the hair of several early-rising Hollywood patrons. "American women know hair, makeup and fingernails, but they know close to nothing about aesthetics, and even less about retarding the aging process," she adds.

Perhaps she's right. Behind me mirrors reflect, in hundreds of increasingly tiny forms, the receding image of my own aging self. Beauty care has never ranked high on my to-do list of life, in large measure because I have never suffered from the pimple fests, acne supernovas and facial moonscapes that mark the hormonally riotous years of so many teenagers. Rather, my teenage years were marked by obsessive tanning, for which my water-leached skin is now badly paying. I have also not escaped the faint crow's feet and tiny fissure-like wrinkles that mark time's creeping advance, and have done close to nothing to "retard" this process.

Sooner or later, everyone's skin follows the same route. Every two weeks, the thickest outer layer of our epidermis, called the horny layer (or the stratum corneum), sloughs off to reveal a new layer. Ignored, our facial skin is like a funky screen door after a dust bowl. Freshly steamed and cleaned, it is a sieve.

What makes caviar so special -- what Elyzabeth says is the scientific rationale for extracting oil from one of the world's most expensive delicacies and incorporating it into skin cream -- is its cellular structure, which is strikingly similar to that of skin: 50 to 70 percent water, with a similar percentage breakdown of lipids, protids and trace elements. "When you put caviar essence on your skin, you're giving back life to the cells because of the cellular consistency between skin and caviar," says Elyzabeth. "If you were to graft skin to skin, you would renew the skin. It's that simple."

That one of the world's most curious fish produces the world's most luxurious eggs is one of nature's little ironies. The sturgeon is a toothless, omnivorous shark-like bottom-feeding sea bed prodder with an extendable snout and an exoskeletal bony plate. It has been cruising the Caspian Sea for nearly 180 million years. For centuries, only the roe from three types of sturgeon could be called caviar: the beluga, the ossetra and the sevruga. These fish are prehistoric, predatory and prolific. The massive beluga can measure up to 30 feet long, weigh more than 2,000 pounds and yield more than 15 percent of its weight in roe. Many of them live beyond 100 years.

To watch sturgeon being harvested is to lose your appetite, if only momentarily, for these precious fish eggs: The capacious, fleshy female is hauled onto a boat and transported to a sea-bound facility. There, on marble tabletops that look vaguely sepulchral, its belly is slit with a colossal knife and a great torrent of viscous eggs comes rushing out of the sturgeon's exposed roe sack. No matter how disconcerting it is, this process has not abated the world's appetite for caviar, which has brought the sturgeon close to the brink of extinction.

That caviar could actually be good for your skin is not particularly unusual. We've put everything from legume oils and fruit acids to human placenta in skin cream. And yet caviar is different because it is, in fact, a dense mass of eggs, each containing the entire range of specialized materials -- the cells, protective membrane and nutritive elements -- that produce life. This makes one wonder if any egg (say, from a tuna, a dog or a human) could be used for the same effect. Be that as it may, the sturgeon is the only living creature whose eggs have been singled out and consumed throughout the centuries with almost mythic relish.

At Elyzabeth's salon, as my pores dilate under an insistent shaft of steam, I'm left to wonder if there isn't a metaphysical relationship here. If our skin cells resemble those of sturgeon eggs, could it be that our bodies -- which consist largely of salty water, which gestate in the early stages of embryonic life in amniotic fluid that is similar to sea water and which, in fact, develop the traces of our ancestral relationship with fish in the form of very tiny gills -- recognize in caviar some vestigial and primordial reflection of their own sentient, life-producing selves? Could this also explain our seemingly incomprehensible and prodigious love for caviar, and our willingness to spend extraordinary amounts of money consuming the little seafaring ovum?

I do not ask these questions of my aesthetician, who is busy topping off the $95, one-and-a-half-hour facial with a head massage. My skin has been steamed, cleaned, exfoliated, masked and creamed. Unfortunately, the caviar cream itself has been stripped of its "fishy smell" ("Americans don't appreciate fishy smells," Elyzabeth tells me), and I'm left on my own to conjure up the taste of the tiny, briny ovum while I have what seems, for all intents and purposes, like a traditional facial.

It's not. Of the few facials I've had, this is the only one that has left my skin so taut and shiny that for several days it actually radiates health. It glows. People notice. "What have you done to your face?" they ask. Several days later, however, my skin slowly loses its radiant shine and I realize that, short of daily caviar consumption and facial treatments (which would quickly lead to financial ruin), the aging process will keep marching on. My skin will keep sloughing off layer upon layer of dead cells; new ones will rejuvenate my epidermal horny layer but never quite as fast as when I was a 16-year-old girl drinking up the sun. All the more reason to appreciate life's little epicurean pleasures as often as you can.

Before leaving Elyzabeth's salon, I ask her if she actually eats caviar on a regular basis. She steps back and, looking vaguely surprised by the question, replies, "But of couse!"