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By KERRY DIAMOND
Published: May 1, 2005
New York
Cornelia Zicu was a teenager in the 70's, but she didn't come of age using ''Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific'' shampoo, Bonne Bell Lip Smackers or other drug store favorites from the Me Decade. Growing up under the long-reaching shadow of Nicolae Ceausescu's Communist regime, she had a beauty routine that revolved around concoctions her grandmother made from scratch during a family tradition known as Beauty Saturday. During the weekly ritual, Bunica Maria, as her grandmother was called, worked in the kitchen mixing oatmeal, honey, salt, milk and oils to make a body scrub. For moisturizer, she blended calendula extract with chicken or pork fat in a pot on the stove. Oil, eggs and scraps of leftover fruit were whipped together for face masks, while walnuts and leaves were brewed into a hair-and-scalp tonic.
Bunica Maria probably had big dreams for her family, but it would have taken psychic abilities to predict that her granddaughter would someday be the name behind one of Manhattan's biggest spas, Cornelia Day Resort. This cosseting oasis, which officially opens this month, occupies the top two floors of the Fifth Avenue building that also houses the Ferragamo flagship. It covers nearly 22,000 square feet -- huge by beauty-industry standards -- and cost more than $10 million. (Her partners are Rick Aidekman, who made his fortune in real estate, and his wife, Ellen Sackoff, who is one of Zicu's clients.) ''For my grandmother, the most amazing thing was the castle of Romania's former king,'' Zicu says. ''She would think this is the new castle.''
The treatment is nothing short of royal: iPods for guests to walk around with, safes in every locker, scalp and foot massages during each treatment, a V.I.P. entrance, a fresh bottle of nail polish opened for each manicure or pedicure, contact-lens cases with Cornelia's logo and smoothies and snacks developed by the star caterer Abigail Kirsch. There's an indoor pool for watsu, a floating massage conducted in warm, salted water; marble soaking tubs; a restaurant; and her own extensive Cornelia product line. A rooftop garden is set to open this summer. ''Every other spa in New York is going to have to sit up and take notice,'' says Jane Larkworthy, the beauty director of W magazine and a fan of Zicu's for years. ''She has brought things to a new level.''
For Zicu, 44, to have a spa like this is the equivalent of plucking an indie-film extra to carry a $100 million Hollywood extravaganza. Previously, she was employed as a facialist at the Peninsula Hotel spa, a nice-enough spot but not something you'd find on many best-of lists. Still, the soft-spoken blonde had a devoted following of beauty editors and executives, and every so often she would whisper into their ears her plan to open a spa of her own. These musings surely sounded like fantasy, but Zicu had come too far to think small. ''Everybody knows we had 50 years of dictatorship in Romania, where the mission was to destroy us, brainwash us and make our lives miserable and ugly,'' she explains. ''The country was like a jail. You didn't have freedom, and it came to the point where you were scared to dream.'' Zicu's father-in-law was jailed twice, and her brother was sentenced to prison several times (leading, she says, to her mother's fatal heart attack). She fled this Orwellian situation with her husband and young son in 1989. The family spent a month in an Austrian refugee camp, where Zicu gave herself facials with leftover yogurt and fruit scraps, and spent two years living near the German border before heading to America in 1992 with $200 in her pocket and no English. She scrubbed staircases and went to beauty school so she could get a license to work as an aesthetician.
Despite all the hardship, she's a cheerful extrovert whose favorite salutation is ''I love you, baby,'' punctuated with a hug. What is more, she has no desire to erase her past: a number of the signature treatments are inspired by ingredients from back home and the beauty lessons taught by her grandmother. Clients can be exfoliated with Bunica's signature scrub, which for now is made with honey from North Yorkshire, England, rather than Romania. (Zicu is still sorting out her suppliers.) Powdered white mud extracted from Romania's Lake Amara is whipped into creams for a multitude of body treatments. The mineral-packed mud is famous for its healing properties, and Romanians have been known to gather along the shore and slather themselves with it. (A mud-based product line is in the works.) And throughout the spa, the air is purified by Romanian salt filters, a nod to speleotherapy, the popular Eastern European course of treatment for respiratory ailments that prescribes spending time underground in salt mines.
''I don't want my clients to think this is just another fancy spa,'' Zicu says. She is not one to mention that Lindsay Lohan and her mother, Dina, spent one afternoon there, nor does she point out the fancy backlighted green onyx lobby or the 500-thread-count sheets on the treatment beds. But the man whose psoriasis she cured? Or the client with the eczema she helped clear up? Or the therapeutic teas she brews based on what she drank growing up? This is the stuff that gets her excited. ''I know I can change people's lives and make sure they stay healthy and beautiful for a long time,'' she says.
Bunica would be proud.
Kerry Diamond is the beauty director of Harper's Bazaar and the author of ''Kevyn Aucoin: A Beautiful Life.''
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