California Dreaming
Five days in California for bathing, beauty retailer and to meet our community.
Last week I went to Los Angeles for a very short trip to immerse myself in all things bathing and beauty. Here's what went down…
I Got Glass Skin at the Korean Bathhouse
One of my favourite things I did in LA was finally meeting Courtney Wittich, who writes the brilliant Substack - Spaaaaaaaaah. We’d followed each other online for a while and immediately had that rare feeling of already knowing each other through shared taste, curiosity and obsession with bathing. I loved her instantly. There’s something so nice about meeting internet friends in real life and realising they’re even better offline — warmer, funnier, more generous. It still feels kind of magical to me even though ive been on the internet meeting strangers for like 25 years.
Courtney took me to Olympic Spa in Koreatown for a Korean body scrub and it was amazing.. The closest similar experience I’ve had was being in a women’s hammam in Morocco last year — women lying naked on hot slabs being scrubbed within an inch of their lives with those rough Italy towels. The feeling was the same. Total surrender. Total care. At Olympic Spa, I was covered in honey, washed with milk, scrubbed, rinsed, steamed and polished until my skin felt completely new. Glass skin, truly. The woman doing my treatment barely spoke to me, but there was something so intimate in the rhythm of it all — women caring for women through heat, water and touch.
It made me realise again how much my life and travel revolve around water now. I genuinely choose destinations based on where I can soak, steam, float or scrub myself back into existence. Hammams in Morocco, onsens in Japan, thermal baths in Europe, Korean spas in LA. The first thing I look for when I land in a new country now is heat, steam and cold water. Contrast therapy is genuinely the best cure for plane lethargy I’ve ever found — it resets my body faster than sleep, coffee or any wellness supplement ever has, and gets my lymphatic system moving again. Do you sauna as soon as you land?
