59WELLNESS Bloomberg Pursuits March 2, 2020
Way more
people are
doing Botox
than you think
Even at a place such as Canyon Ranch,
the full detox has recently gone a little
more, um, tox. That’s thanks to Amy
Henderson, who introduced injectables
when she arrived as director of the
resort’s medical aesthetics division.
Oddly enough, the elderly guests
who signed up first were the same ones
throwing shade about whether Botox
belonged on the ranch at all. “I think
everyone was worried that I was going
to be some scary Botox lady, looking
all exaggerated and fake,” Henderson
explains. But as it turns out, high-level
execs searching for a physical and mental
recharge want to look the part, too. Now,
on average, she touches up a dozen faces
a day—including those of the company’s
top brass.
Demand, Henderson says, is why
the ranch added these plastic surgery-
adjacent treatments in the first place:
“So many people were sneaking off
property in the middle of their stay to
visit different clinics around Tucson, we
decided to bring it in-house.”
More than half of her patients are
first-timers who feel safe dabbling in
something new if it’s within the confines
of the ranch. And although the average
filler treatment runs $2,000 to $3,000,
“dipping a toe” into a light dewrinkling can
cost only $12 a unit, making it much easier
to stomach. (The typical forehead touch-
up includes 35 or so units—or $400.)
But bragging about one’s Botox is far
from commonplace. In fact, guests are so
tight-lipped (really, the jokes are endless
here) about treatments that they prefer
to omit the line item from their resort bill,
paying in cash or divvying up the expense
across several credit cards to hide the
indulgence, even from their spouse.
The boom in Botox is palpable, but
the requests remain grounded. Well,
relatively. “Recently I had a young woman
aspiring to look like a Snapchat-filtered
photo of herself—that was unsettling,”
Henderson says. But no one’s demanded
that their Shar-Pei be shot up, and “we’ve
yet to receive a request for scrotox,”
she adds. We’ll let you figure out what
that entails. <BW>Guests ate a ton
of kale last year
Well, more precisely, 3 tons. “Diet’s a
four-letter word at Canyon Ranch,”
says executive chef Russell Michel, who
joined the resort in 2019 after catering
a vegan bat mitzvah for Zuckerman’s
granddaughter. Michel doesn’t adhere to
buzzwords such as “keto,” “gluten-free,” or
“paleo.” He simply reproportions ratios of
meat, vegetables, and carbs.
The results are palpable: In my one
week, I dropped 7 pounds of holiday chub I
didn’t even know I was hiding.
In 2019, while the resort was at 70% of
its normal capacity because of renovations,
guests devoured 6,000 pounds of kale,
7,000 pounds of salmon, 10,000 pounds
of apples, and—vampires, beware—more
than 4,000 pounds of garlic. Scarcity and
skyrocketing prices caused a decline in
avocado consumption (guests still ate about
50,000 of them last year), while celery was
ascendant, a direct result of rampant juicing.
It’s possible to eat too much produce
at the ranch—even without exceeding the
recommended 600 calories at dinner. One
guest ate 2 pounds of carrots a day, turning
the palms of her hands orange. Another
insisted on consuming 4 pounds of cut-up
cauliflower daily, which apparently causes
an odd set of digestion issues. About
cauliflower: It’s the most consumed veg on
campus; the chefs prepared 13,000 pounds
of it last year.