Testing an Odd Beauty Procedure for the Red Carpet LOS ANGELES - What's a nice guy like me doing on a trampoline like this? Every time Hollywood celebrates itself with a big awards show (every five minutes, or so it seems), the celebrity media - the "Today" show, Us magazine - dutifully trots out the beauty pundits. Tooth-whitening salons and Botox spas are absolutely jampacked, they report, as stars race to get red carpet pretty. And there is always an outlandish new procedure. In a repackaging of the time-tested laser treatment, a Santa Monica spa is charging $575 to dewrinkle male genitalia. If you believe this month's Details, the procedure is "picking up steam in Hollywood," where it has become "an awards-season staple." Eye roll. But I was curious. Not tighten-the-tackle curious, mind you - George Clooney can try that and let us know how it goes. But with the Emmy Awards scheduled for next Sunday and the Oscar season slog already setting in, I did wonder: Do any of these you've-got-to-be-kidding-me treatments actually work? It may not be the newest body-enhancing therapy in town, but the signature offering at LA SlimWrap definitely qualifies as bizarre. They ask you to strip to your underwear. A technician wraps you, toes to neck to wrists, in 15 to 20 tight Ace bandages, which are squirted with a cloudy, warm mineral solution. And then you are instructed to bounce on a trampoline for 50 minutes. For real. Picture a dripping mummy hop, hop, hopping. The SlimWrap shot to fame in 2007, when Ellen DeGeneres, joking about looking good while hosting the Oscars, tried one on her daytime talk show. She will return to host the Academy Awards in March. "You look a little crazy, but it really does work," Ms. DeGeneres told her viewers. I made an appointment. Eden Sher, who plays the ever-bumbling Sue Heck on the comedy "The Middle," which returns to ABC on Sept. 25, agreed to come along. Ms. Sher, 21, is not remotely in need of shrink wrapping. But I suspected that she may have some thoughts about the pressure to have a perfect body. After all, Ms. Sher is a woman living in Los Angeles who works on camera, a triple whammy. So there we were inside the scented waiting room of LA SlimWrap, a tatty little spa decorated with pictures of random reality-TV stars and a few actual celebrities, like Morgan Fairchild. We filled out release forms acknowledging that we were being wrapped at our own risk and promising that we had no "lesions, open wounds or communicable diseases." Afsi Naim, the spa's owner, appeared in a smock and led me into the back. "We're going to have to go extra tight on some of these problem areas," she said with a wave of her hand in my general direction. My whole body is a problem area? She then started wrapping. "Suck it in," she instructed. I laughed nervously. She raised her voice: "Suck it in!" If I didn't feel bad about myself before, I certainly did then. Once individually encased in our bandages, Ms. Sher and I rejoined each other in the main room, a dimly lighted space the size of a studio apartment that contained two mini-trampolines. Each one was equipped with handlebars in case we started to lose our balance. "Hop on," Ms. Naim commanded in a way that recalled Nurse Ratched. With a tape recorder running and a spa assistant arriving intermittently to rewet our bandages and change liquid collection bags attached to our feet, Ms. Sher started to ruminate on what she called "the Hollywood beauty machine." "It's terrifying that everyday people across America - the world - look to Hollywood to tell them what is pretty and how they should attain it," she said in her mile-a-minute way. It's completely unattainable, of course. But rather than saying that, the magazines and tabloid TV shows buy in. It's an awards-season staple, whatever that means, so you had better get busy doing it out in El Paso. Ms. Naim walked by and threw an eyebrow in our direction as if to say, "I don't see enough hopping." The exercise is necessary, she said, to boost circulation "while the toxins come out and the minerals absorb." We picked up the pace. "For years, I was terribly insecure about my body, and look at me, I'm tiny," Ms. Sher said. I binge-dieted and starved myself because the world was telling me that I needed to be even skinnier than I already was. And it didn't matter how skinny I got. I would look in the mirror and hate what I saw. Ms. Sher, who won a Critics Choice Award in June for "The Middle" and gained attention last fall for a very, very bubbly red carpet interview with Taylor Swift, said her breaking point came two summers ago. "I had a rough breakup, and I realized that I would never be happy with myself unless I got out of that hamster wheel," she said. Because it's never enough, never enough, never enough. She was worked up now and getting some good air on her hops. Ms. Sher noted that she even invented a word to describe the predicament: "emotaling," which she defines on her Web site as "to feel, think and judge oneself in rapid succession, ultimately causing immobility." It sounded good to me. Then again, I was feeling a little woozy. And squished. Just then, Ms. Naim's assistant came to fetch us for the unwrapping, which was done individually behind a partition. I tensely envisioned the "Absolutely Fabulous" episode in which Edina wraps herself in a similar contraption and shrieks upon the reveal, "I've put on 12 inches all over my body! Every pore is now an overeater! The upshot: My midsection was more compressed - maybe not "6 to 20 inches slimmer in just 1 hour" thin, as promised on the spa's Web site, but thinner. "I notice a big difference," a wide-eyed Ms. Naim said, as if she had just witnessed a walrus transform into a whippet. Ms. Sher, having no fat to compress, looked roughly the same. "Everybody responds differently," Ms. Naim said later by telephone. Some people need two to three wraps to feel some kind of result. Ms. Sher's reaction to that statement: "Oh, brother." We were told to avoid junk food, caffeine and alcohol for the next 24 hours and to drink a gallon of water. A bit dizzy, we stumbled out of the spa - it felt as if we had both just climbed out of Willie Nelson's bong - and Ms. Sher suggested that we grab lunch at a nearby diner. So much for healthy living: Ms. Sher ordered a roast beef sandwich topped with melted Cheddar and provolone. "Can I also get bacon on that?" she asked the waitress. No fruit, but I would definitely like waffle fries. Did she want a side of ranch dressing? Brooks Barnes is a reporter in the Los Angeles bureau of The New York Times. Scene Stealers appears monthly.