Because male circumcision is so common in the states, few Americans realize how rare it is most everywhere else. The practice has fallen by the wayside in Australia, Canada, Britain and New Zealand, and fewer than one-fifth of all male Europeans are circumcised. In December, the Danish Medical Association recommended ending the practice for boys, arguing that because it permanently alters the body it should be “an informed, personal choice” that young men make for themselves.

In Germany, a district judge ruled in 2012 that ritual circumcision of juveniles is a crime that violates “the fundamental right of the child to bodily integrity.” South Korea is the only Asian country to embrace the procedure, as a kind of physiological souvenir of America’s occupation following World War II. But there, too, circumcision rates are declining fast, as the adolescent boys who would otherwise go under the knife (as per local custom) gain access to research about its purported benefits online. There’s now a well established industry built on obtaining the foreskins of neonate baby boys in the United States. In the American healthcare system, parents pay between $200 to $350 to obstetricians to circumcise their boys. Moreover, there is an even bigger foreskin industry operating behind the scenes almost invisibly. Neonate foreskins are sold by the hospitals to bio-engineering and cosmetics companies who turn them into highly profitable products. The numbers of dollars involved are staggering, and this financial force funds lobbying and propaganda in favour of circumcision, because the end of circumcision would mean the end of the industry. The resale value of neonate foreskins is dizzying in that from one baby boy’s foreskin can be grown bio-engineered skin in a lab to the size of a football field. That’s 4 acres of new skin or around 200,000 units of manufactured skin, which is enough skin to cover about 250 people and sells at up to $3,000 a square foot. Considering that there are 1.25 million neonate foreskins circumcised each year in the U.S alone this is presumably the most lucrative trade in body parts in the history of humanity. The billion dollar beauty industry keeps coming up with new, innovative facial treatments that promise to banish fine lines, smooth out wrinkles, and even out skin tone. From stem cell face creams to prescription strength retinoids, the possibilities are endless. That’s why we found it funny last month when numerous publications were writing about the “baby foreskin facial.”

New York, Refinery 29, and the Huffington Post are just three publications that wrote about the procedure in the past month. But “baby foreskin” being used in beauty products is nothing new. In fact, the active ingredient in an Oprah-touted skin cream from SkinMedica uses “foreskin fibroblasts” that are used to grow and cultivate new cells. Just one foreskin is said to be able to grow these cells for decades. But it’s not just skin creams that use the ingredient. Foreskin fibroblasts are also used to help treat burn victims, help cover diabetic ulcers, and more.