You could say say Lord Gavin McLeod-Valentine was born to be a facial masseur to the stars. Or you could say he just kind of fell into it. Both assessments, as the publicist-turned-blogger-turned-facialist tells it, are somewhat true.
“I was always looking for something bigger than my surroundings,” said the 2026 WWD Style Awards Skin Savior honoree, who grew up in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, before moving to New York City during his early adulthood in pursuit of a big career break.
“I’m a Millennial gay, so the whole ‘Madonna arriving in Times Square with 30 bucks’ thing was always interesting to me,” said McLeod-Valentine. “I remember watching the ‘Boss Women: Anna Wintour’ documentary, which sort of collided with ‘Sex and the City,’ and I just thought, ‘New York is where I’m supposed to be.’”
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After a drama school stint, McLeod-Valentine took up work as a publicist and simultaneously got to work on a beauty blog called “Amber and Smoke,” for which he interviewed beauty insiders about their routines. Eventually one of those insiders put Intraceuticals — the company now known for pioneering the oxygen facial — on his radar.
“They were innovative, but they weren’t sexy, and they were struggling with PR,” said McLeod-Valentine, who took the company on as a client and ended up booking Halle Berry in for an oxygen facial ahead of her first Met Gala appearance in 2017.
At the request of Berry’s team, though, it was McLeod-Valentine — who had yet to train or consider a career as a facialist — who executed the facial.
“I don’t know if I would have the same courage today — and I think my husband had about 30 practice facials in two days beforehand — but it was something where I just put my hands on her face and I could feel what I needed to do. It was almost like I was being guided outside of myself,” he said.
In addition to executing the oxygen facial, McLeod-Valentine delivered the earliest iteration of his now-signature facial massage, meant to lymphatically drain the face to emphasize a client’s facial structure while boosting skin radiance and hydration before a major red carpet appearance.
The A-listers came flocking in: from Kim Kardashian to Susan Sarandon to Zoe Saldaña to Jonathan Bailey and beyond. McLeod-Valentine (who, yes, then formally obtained an aesthetician’s license, and even trained in the Japanese Kobido facial massage in Guanting, China) soon became a go-to facial masseur to the stars.
“I knew I didn’t want to be a traditional facialist — I wanted to create this position for myself as the red carpet facial sculptor,” he said.
McLeod-Valentine’s career highlight reel includes prepping Laura Dern’s skin the day she won her first Oscar in 2020 for Best Supporting Actress in “Marriage Story”; answering the call when Netflix’s “The Crown” sought to make members of its cast — including Helena Bonham Carter and Olivia Coleman — appear younger in certain scenes of the show’s third season, which spans 13 years, and joining skin care brand Augustinus Bader as an ambassador in 2021.
“Something I’ve come to say often is, you can lift it, you can freeze it, you can fill it, you can fry it — but if you don’t address communication and hydration being well within the skin — you don’t look younger,” said McLeod-Valentine.
Most of his work, he added, is about “magnifying what a client is already working with.”
“I analyze where a client is holding their congestion; I’ll ascertain what is the most striking feature on their face and what structural point I need to draw out, and I’ll ask their sensitivity level,” he said. Radio frequency; microcurrent; Lyma laser; a concentrator featuring an Augustinus Bader serum made just for McLeod-Valentine’s use, and a guided meditation complete the treatment.
“The facial generally takes an hour to an hour-and-a-half,” said McLeod-Valentine, who is now based in Los Angeles.
The January through March awards season during which the Critics Choice Awards, Golden Globes, Oscars, Grammys and SAG Awards are held in rapid-fire succession is his most intensive work period. Then comes a more relaxed (sometimes “Real Housewives”-filled) rest period in April, before the Met Gala kicks things up again in May.
“When you have a job that has you traveling every week or every other week, it’s important during my time off that I get back to a routine, set my intentions for the year, reconnect with friends and family, and just allow myself to not feel like there’s a stopwatch beside my head,” said McLeod-Valentine, who has simultaneously been quietly forging another career frontier as he gears up to launch a skin care device of his own.
“If you want to be lifted, sculpted, snatched, revenge-reunion-ready — you’ll be good to go,” he teased of the innovation, which will debut this year.
As for what McLeod-Valentine would tell the version of himself who, nine years ago, improvised his way through his first career facial with Berry?
“You are going to love who you become,” he said. “Growing up gay, it’s like you’re in survival mode the whole time. I didn’t like myself for a long time because I didn’t allow myself to see who I am. That can sort of have a knock-on effect where you’re actually then disengaged from your achievements. And I think one of the things that’s been hardest for me to learn is to trust success, and that success doesn’t have to come with some form of retribution.
“So I think I would let my younger self know, you’re about to go on a hell of a ride. It’s going to be bumpy, but turbulence never brings the plane down.”
