Old coast, new wave

Layan, Phuket, offers better value than the Maldives. Take in the lagoons, wellness rituals, food and wine. It’s closer than you think

- VIR SANGHVI

How bad is my face? Not great, apparently. I sat in Layan, in Thailand, staring at a high-tech machine with a doctor. The doctor took pictures of my face and the machine did the rest.

It looked for signs of sun damage and finally posted a visual in which I looked like I had a bad case of measles. The spots marked all the places where my skin had been damaged. Then, the device looked for ‘hyperpigmentation’ (I had no idea what that meant). The machine threw up another picture of me. This time, I looked like a leopard: My face had another array of spots.

The doctor looked surprised. That's very bad, he said. What kind of sunscreen did I use? I told him I never used any. And perhaps I should also change my moisturiser, he added. I said, shamefaced, that I had never moisturised in my life.

But it wasn’t a total downer. The machine would now tell me how I would look at 80, the doctor declared. The screen threw up a picture of a bad-tempered man in early old age who had clearly coloured his beard. As this is roughly how I look now, he conceded that perhaps I would not age so badly.

Then he wanted to check how my avoidance of moisturisers, sunscreens and other kinds of goo had aged my skin. Apparently we all have two ages. Our real age and the age of our skin. The machine did its calculations. My skin was actually six years younger than my biological age, it concluded. The doctor seemed puzzled. I first looked relieved and then, extremely smug.