Everywhere I look there is nudity, brightly-lit and mostly unapologetic: on me, on my three friends, and on the dozens of other women here on a Saturday evening for a series of soaks, scrubs, saunas, and steams. The towels are too small to provide any sort of coverage, perhaps by design. I start out in the nudity-required area, where I move from a shower to a steam room, to a hot sauna and a freezing-cold pool, then back again.
I also take a dip in the hot whirlpool and begin to feel my tired musclesβand my Puritanical inhibitionsβrelax. Then I lie down on a stone slab beneath infrared lights, feeling a little bit like a Big Mac abandoned under a heat lamp. Devotees of Korean spas promise that weekly or monthly visits can do wonders for your blood pressure, fatigue, stress levels, and chronic pain. Some of these claims are backed by science , with studies showing that some saunas can detoxify and improve cardiovascular health.
All I know is I feel really relaxed when I hear my number called. I walk, naked you get the picture now , to the scrub room, which has four wet, vinyl-covered tables manned by middle-aged Korean women wearing black bathing suits. I lie face-down, and my attendant flings a towel over my face. I peek out to see her lathering up some gritty mitts with what looks and smells like Irish Spring soap. And then she gets to work, using both hands to scrub my body in long swipes and big circles.
She roughly turns my head and flings my limbs out of the way and sloshes a bowl of warm water all over me. She sloshes more water over me, turns me on each side for more scrubbing, then rubs me down with liquid Dial and sends me to rinse off. As I half-stumble to the showers I see another room, where women are wearing soft pink ponchos that cinch around their necks and cover them entirely, draping around their seats.
They look like cupcakes, heads poking up like cherries on top, or like human tea cozies. Gwyneth Paltrow would be proud. But I take a hard pass.
