New York City Health & Beauty

If you haven’t yet caught the sauna/cold plunge bug, one class here will make you a believer. No one does it like Othership: You join a group class—the sauna is huge, and there are 8 ice baths—and follow along with guided breathwork as you move through the hot-cold circuit. Or book a self-guided “free flow,” where you cycle between the two at your own pace. It’s social, spiritual, and intense—and you leave feeling inexplicably better.

You leave a session with Amy Nelms looking (and feeling) strong and invigorated—and swearing by the very-real powers of Pilates. The woman behind some of the city’s most graceful bodies—many of her clients are top models and actors—is a special combination of encouraging, kind, funny, and focused. She’s incredibly knowledgeable about the mechanics of the body, and sends clients away with “homework” to strengthen, elongate, and chisel at home. Her studio is gorgeous and atmospheric—gleamy wood floors, a pretty candle almost always burning in the corner, and a state of the art reformer and other Pilates equipment that’s so artful it could double as furniture in a sleek living room—and bathed in natural light on a top floor in the beautiful Flatiron district. She only offers one-on-ones.

Founded by holistic medicine expert and sports chiropractor Jonathan Leary, Remedy Place is positioned as a social wellness club. The idea is that you enjoy treatments like ice baths, hyperbaric chambers, cryotherapy, and infrared saunas (no gym equipment) in solitude or in the company of like-minded people.

You might come here for the airy, high-ceilinged, wide-plank-floored, beautifully tiled space, but the incredible Jivamukti-trained teachers who run the studio are an even more compelling reason to stay. You’ll get a great workout, chant, and deeply relax—and leave still thinking about the soulful dharma talks. Don’t miss classes with Rima, Monica, Yogeswari, and Ruth.

They offer so many healing modalities here, from acupuncture, craniosacral therapy, and lymphatic massage to cupping, nutritional counseling, and more. Reising—whose kind, focused energy instantly puts you at ease—is devoted to Chinese herbal therapy, one of the world’s oldest medical traditions, using it to help treat and rejuvenate her loyal clients.

It’s not just the glossy nails you walk out with that makes us love this airy nail studio. There’s also the cute slippers they gift you, the red-light treatment that leaves your hands soft as silk…not to mention the service where the salon invites you to write yourself a letter as you wait for your nails to dry. (Write something nice—they mail it to you a few weeks later.) All five locations feel spalike in their serenity, and the Soho location’s lush balcony is perfect for luxuriating as you air-dry your nails.

At the tippy top of the famous Hotel Chelsea, above the fray of downtown Manhattan, sits this light-filled spa-oasis. Everything your eye touches is exquisite—from the rustic brick hearth in the sitting area where you sip cucumber water and the rooftop terrace garden to the festooned-with-flowers sheets on the treatment beds and the heated Japanese toilets in the changing rooms. It’s got everything you want—a traditional Swedish sauna, soaking tubs, rain showers, and epic treatments that leave you feeling practically reborn.

Even someone skeptical of astrology might change their tune after a reading with Vuillemin. She’s ebullient, focused, loving, passionate, honest, and kind. A master at understanding the intimate relationship between the cosmos and our human world, she empowers clients with her astute insights.

This lymphatic drainage studio offers face and body treatments using high-performance rollers, compression sleeves, and massage. They do facials with the LYMA laser, too.

Erika Bloom is famous for her sculpting, chiseling, genius method of Pilates—you activate muscles you didn’t even know you had during a session with her—and her knowledge of anatomy is astounding. She’s studied nutrition and rolfing (a type of body work focused on creating structural change that feels like a hurts-so-good massage) and developed programs to help clients with osteoporosis, diastasis recti, structural alignment, and pelvic floor health. Another focus is postpartum issues—she’s practiced as a birth and postpartum doula. Bloom herself is a walking advertisement for the power of Pilates and her holistic approach to health—she looks graceful and strong as she glides around her airy, gorgeous Tribeca studio. She also leads retreats in Turks & Caicos, the Hamptons, and Connecticut. “Pilates allows us to continue to move beautifully as we age,” she says. “Whereas a lot of exercise methods break down the body and cause injury as we get older.”