Facial

Cumming on someone's face, usually to finish a blowjob: one of the classic endings of gay porn and of real sex alike.

A facial is cumming on someone's face. You give a facial, you get a facial, and the man on his knees is the one receiving it, usually at the end of a blowjob. The joke is right there in the word: the spa treatment that leaves your skin glowing, minus the cucumber slices.

It is a finish, not a whole kind of sex. Most of the time it closes an oral session, sometimes a jerk-off, and it is one of the classic answers to the old question "where do you want it?" The others are a swallow, a creampie or a snowball shared with a kiss.

Where it comes from

The word borrows the beauty salon facial, the cosmetic treatment for the face. Its first recorded appearance in this sense is gay: Green's Dictionary of Slang finds "Facial, to Get a" in Hal Max's 1988 glossary Gay (S)language, tied to giving head. Since then it has spread to every kind of porn, gay and straight, and to everyday sex talk.

In porn

Facials are one of the great conventions of porn. In the condom era the money shot had to be outside the body, so viewers could see it, and the face was the most dramatic place to put it. Directors staged it with care: the kneeling bottom, the top stroking, the close-up. Multiple-guy scenes ended with a row of tops taking turns, a set piece known in the trade as a bukkake when it gets large enough.

Bareback porn shifted some attention inside, but the facial never went away. It remains a standard tag on tube sites and a favorite way to end a deepthroat scene.

How it is used today

On the apps it turns up as a preference or a request: "love giving facials," "into facials and swallowing." Like any finish, it is something you ask about first. Some men love it, others hate cum near their eyes, and that is a conversation to have before, not during.

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