And it has been for a while, at least here in our offices. For months, telltale little green coolers have been making appearances in the fridges at W and WWD. Their contents: the Blueprint Cleanse, which, for those unfamiliar, is a ready-made juice cleanse -- six drinks a day for one, three, five, or, for the incredibly masochistic, seven days. More than ten of us, including Roxanne Robinson-Escriout, Priya Rao, Garrett Munce, Beitressa Mandelbaum, Nick Axelrod and Julee Kaplan, have now tried the cleanse and the response has been mostly positive. Or at least, our participants were willing to take the good with the bad. As Garrett, a fashion assistant at W put it, "Toward the end of day three I just really wanted to chew something. But once it was over, people told me my skin looked amazing and radiant -- something I'd never heard before." (Lest anyone dismiss us as a pack of cliched fashion editors in search of a pre-packaged eating disorder, it should be noted that we're not alone in our purist pursuits: the company's sales have more than doubled in the past year.)I cleansed out of curiosity for the first time in June, at which point the idea of avoiding salt, caffeine, alcohol and solid food seemed exotic and experimental. Driven by visions of vibrant skin and detoxed organs, I forked over $195 for the three-day option and led the monastic life Monday through Wednesday -- a time that included watching friends consume spicy pina coladas at the Rusty Knot while I solemnly sipped a concoction of kale, spinach, green apple, celery and cucumber juice ("It goes down easier with a straw," noted Nick, a WWD fashion assistant). By Thursday, the results were in: I didn't lose any real weight, but I felt lighter. No magic there; I hadn't eaten for three days. And as a person prone to puff, the dramatic de-bloating effect was priceless. On the downside, the cleanse killed my social life -- so on Thursday I broke the post-cleanse rules and had two glasses of champagne at a Jil Sander party. Friday morning found me prostrate on my bathroom floor after paying homage to the porcelain god (Roxanne, WWD's accessories director, reports she had a similar post-cleanse experience when she had a peppered-tuna steak). Still, I was satisfied enough to sign up for a sequel with Sarah Taylor, W senior fashion features editor, earlier this month.
The results the second time around proved less thrilling than the first, although Taylor says her skinny jeans felt a little less skinny afterwards. Maybe I'm just not in the same shape I was during the summer, but this time, I felt less dramatically detoxed post-cleanse. Of course, I don't have any scientific evidence to prove a difference and it could have been all mental. After all, my cheekbones hadn't looked that chiseled since June.
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