Beauty

Ask Jean: What’s the Ultimate in Relaxing Spa Treatments?

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Photo courtesy of Dunton Destinations

Jean Godfrey June

We want to answer your most pressing questions—or, you know, just the things that you’re curious about. Please keep them coming to [email protected]. Below, a q for our beauty director, Jean Godfrey-June.

Dear Jean, What, in your opinion, is the ultimate relaxing spa treatment? —Alex B.

Dear Alex, Some people adore facials; others love scrubs and body wraps. In the end, I like a massage. But in the very end, what I find very-most-relaxing is a giant tub of hot water with only me (and perhaps a love interest) in it. Someday I will go to Japan—it will be snowing, and I will sit in a furo somewhere deep in the mountains (read Kawabata’s Snow Country and you, too, will be transfixed by this possibility) and exult.

Until this day arrives, I content myself with at-home treatments that get at that same hot-cold contrast. I don’t have a cold plunge, but I do have a showerhead hooked up to a hose for a 50-degree outdoor shower. (Stay in it for two minutes, according to Andrew Huberman.)

My sauna, fashioned from an old shed, really delivers on the heat piece; I also got a Mito red-light panel so I can bask in the benefits at the same time—the red light and near-infrared light are said to have benefits for skin, hair, workout recovery, and more.

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To maximize further, I work the brilliant hair serum into my hair before I go in—along with the frizzless, great-texture, and shine-related benefits of the serum, I also feel it helps protect my hair from the heat. I smooth on my favorite face oil before I go in as well, and dry brush once I’m in there. I stay in for around 20 minutes (again, Huberman is the authority), then alternate with cold, always ending on cold.

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I also love baths, and again, 20 minutes is the magic number, this time in terms of soaking time. “The Martini” more than takes the edge off; about halfway through, I smooth on Microderm for a two- or three-minute exfoliation that leaves my skin unbelievably soft and smooth.

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Twin Farms

I’ve also had some pretty incredible furo-adjacent experiences in the US. I was once lucky enough to visit the epically luxurious Twin Farms hotel in Vermont; the furo was a small, unassuming, vaguely New England–looking house; only two glowing Japanese lanterns gave a clue to what lay beyond: You enter through a dressing room, take off your clothes, and descend a few steps into the rest of the house—which is 100 percent filled with about five feet of hot, still water. In other words, the entire house is a bathtub (with walls of windows looking out into the Vermont wilderness).

I floated around for what must have been at least an hour; I really don’t think I’ve ever been more relaxed. You can’t go to the spa unless you stay at the resort, making the experience expensive on the level of getting oneself to Japan. If someone ever offers (Twin Farms or Japan), jump.

And in the meanwhile, know that many of the ingredients in Tata Harper’s magical formulas are made several miles down the road from Twin Farms—smooth on the oil cleanser first, then the Retinoic face oil, and then the body oil: pure, unadulterated heaven.

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hot springs in Dunton

The hot springs in Dunton, Colorado, is hands down the most gorgeous hot-water experience I’ve ever had: The spring naturally bubbles up from the Rocky Mountains, and the Dunton team built a pool to capture it; around that, they rebuilt an old mining cabin, then put in rows of windows overlooking the mountains, strung several chic macramé hammocks, and planted an absolutely spectacular array of gracefully arching plants. It is World of Interiors, spa edition, and I could literally spend days there.

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hot springs in Dunton

Photo courtesy of Tourism Santa Fe

And I had an equally singular, if dramatically less pricey, furo moment in New Mexico, at the Ten Thousand Waves spa in Santa Fe (prices are by the treatment, like at a regular spa; you can also stay the night, but you don’t have to). You ascend stairs in the side of the hills, ideally at sunset (the view from the spa is quite similar to that from the Santa Fe Opera), the path lit with Japanese lanterns. You can get amazing treatments at Ten Thousand Waves, including epic massages, but still, if I had to pick one it would be the hour-long soak in a private outdoor tub (tubs start at $35 a person for an hour) surrounded by piñon pines. I went once when it was snowing, and it was truly one of the most memorable experiences of my life. When I’m late for something important, stuck in traffic in a not-moving cab, Ten Thousand Waves is what I visualize.

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SHIBUI SPA POOL MOHONK MTN HOUSE MASSAGE CABIN

If you get a massage (do—they are the best in New York) at the Shibui Spa in the Greenwich Hotel in downtown New York (above left), you can add in a pretreatment furo-esque soak in a bath that they pour a bottle of sake into for good measure. It is worth the extra money, especially considering that the massages themselves are already on the expensive side (they start at around $220; the extra soak is about $95). While you wait, though, you lounge for free by the Japanese-style indoor pool, where incredibly nice attendants bring you tea and various snacks.

Alternately, talk your partner into a full-body-massage exchange; for the ultimate, start with a Theragun, do the whole body, then smooth on body oil to massage in with your hands (this way the Theragun does all the heavy lifting, so you don’t need hands of steel to satisfy the massagee). The goop one smells like a forest, so you get in a bit of the forest bathing you might experience, say, in the outdoor cliff-top massage huts at Mohonk Mountain House (above right; the massages are epic on their own, but the spruce-scented breeze and the chorus of birds singing really take it to the next level).

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DEPLAR COLD PLUNGE + SAUNA IN HILL DEPLAR COLD PLUNGE + SAUNA IN HILL

The cold plunge outside the Viking Sauna at Deplar Farm in northern Iceland is kept at 4 degrees Celsius and looks like a sleeker, chicer version of something a character in the German series Dark might climb down into. The sauna, built into a small hill the way the Vikings apparently did long ago, sweat-lodge-style, is enormous and very hot. Guides encourage you as you sweat and cheer you on as you stand, neck-deep, in the icy Icelandic plunge. Standing there after making it through, the wind whistling across the valley to the gigantic mountains rising all around it, I have never felt so invincible.

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