Spa-Experience

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A snack for the skin

Cosmetics trend claims food that’s good inside is good for your outside as well

For Jean Halter of Odessa, a facial is the ultimate way to pamper yourself. Make it a chocolate facial, and we’re talking stairway-to-heaven stuff for the self-confessed chocoholic.

“I don’t even now how to describe it,” Halter says of the facial she received at the La Dolce Vita Spa for Wellness in Middletown. “It was very relaxing, number one, and smelled scrumptious. It was a really neat experience, and I’m going to ask for another one.”

Her food-infused beauty treat is just one of many culinary-influenced products and services flooding the market.

Generations ago, beauty care often consisted of mashing food at home and slathering it on, in the hope of creating tighter skin or shinier hair. Now beauty products and venues are commercializing that idea, incorporating fruits, vegetables and even chocolate and wine.

In Minneapolis, Minn., as Horst Rechelbacher, founder of Intelligent Nutrients, works on his new cosmetics line, he occasionally pours some of his ingredients into a glass, tops it with mineral water and drinks it.

This isn’t a case of Dr. Jekyll trying his strange brews on himself. Rechelbacher uses organic, high-grade food in his line that includes cosmetics, hair care and soaps.

Rechelbacher’s line is the pinnacle of beauty’s return to the basics, because all of the ingredients contain no chemicals or artificial preservatives. What is more commonly found around Delaware are spas offering treatments with food mixed in.

“It’s as healthy for the skin outside as it is inside,” said Chris Sateriale, owner of La Dolce Vita, which offers chocolate facials and scrubs as well as fruit masks and peels. “I think it’s because people are realizing that the enzymes and the benefits you can get from fruits and vegetables are very good and very healthy for the rejuvenation of the skin.”

It’s a trend, Rechelbacher said, but a trend driven by knowledge.

“We are constantly educating ourselves,” he said. “We are getting smarter.”

“I think that the pendulum just swings … and right now it’s swinging in the direction of going back to the basics of skin care,” said Devon Tucker, owner of Covet Spa in Greenville.

Margie Hartnett, owner of Visions Hair Design, an Aveda concept salon located on Concord Pike which carries Intelligent Nutrients products, believes people are becoming more health-oriented.

“We’re more vain, so if it’s proven, we want to be younger and act younger,” Hartnett said.

Antioxidants are the buzzword in food and beauty for their anti-aging benefits. Thus, food products high in antioxidants, such as dark chocolate, wine, fruits, vegetables and teas, also are popular in beauty products.

Vitamins such as C and E and enzymes found in foods like pumpkins, avocados and papayas give a kick to your skin, Hartnett said.

“Your body will absorb anything you put on your skin unless it is too big, in which case it will block your pores,” said Hartnett.

“If you want your hair, body and skin to look better, you have to start from within,” said Hartnett. “You can use good hair conditioners or whatever, but if you’re not eating properly, it won’t help.”

Rechelbacher said he decided to research organic cosmetics after learning about how quickly the body absorbs toxins through the skin and how long those unnatural products take to get out of the human system.

“I started looking at nurturing the body from the inside and the outside,” said Rechelbacher.

A handful of Intelligent Nutrients’ supplements is available, but a full line of products — including hair care, makeup, pet-care products, personal lubricants and maternity products — will be launched this fall, said Rechelbacher, who plans to open stores in Manhattan and Minnesota’s Mall of America.

Rather than use mineral water as a base for his cleansers, Rechelbacher uses fruit juices. Hairspray retains its stickiness through water-soluble, food-grade gum resins used to harden candies. Kale extracts provide the foaming action in shampoos and soaps. Even the preservatives for the perishable ingredients are all natural.

“We’re not encouraging people to start eating our products,” said Rechelbacher. “If you have nothing else to eat, you can survive. It’s not going to taste good, but it will smell good.”

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After Laura Noss signed up to receive a weekly organic produce box from a farm near her home in Menlo Park, Calif., she decided that fruits and vegetables grown close to home taste better.

“It has opened my eyes to what is local and seasonal,” Ms. Noss said. “I now understand that what I put in my body and on my body matters.”

So she began looking for ways to go local beyond the palate. Last year, while she planned a getaway to Maui, she hunted for treatments that used indigenous ingredients at the Grand Wailea Resort Hotel and Spa. That is how she found herself being scrubbed with locally-sourced coconut and sugar, then dunked in just-harvested coconut milk — for $160 a treatment.

“It felt like it would be fresher than some of the other treatments,” said Ms. Noss, 38, the founder of Social Planets, a communications and marketing company. “I envisioned the woman going out to the tree and plucking my coconut.”

More than 28 percent of spas nationwide use local ingredients, according to a 2007 survey by the International Spa Association, a trade group for the industry. Last year, after seeing the trend take off, the association started tracking how many of the 3,000 spas in its membership use ingredients from local nature in treatments.

In an age of global warming and high gas prices, is it any wonder that more spa-goers are gravitating to blueberries, honey and even maple syrup, cultivated close by because they believe it leaves a lighter carbon footprint?

The local-food movement, popularized by writers like Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, has created an aura of authenticity around all things local. Forward-thinking spas have long included indigenous ingredients on their menus, but more spa owners have entered the game of late, now that customers will pay more for services they deem environmentally responsible.

Some spas use the local produce in unexpected ways. The Cliff House Resort and Spa in Ogunquit, Me., offers its guests a Maine blueberry body wrap for $110. You can also get a Maine Blueberry Pedicure.

That more businesses (spas included) are rushing to make greenbacks off the green-minded hasn’t escaped the notice of Jessica Jensen, a founder of Low Impact Living, an online resource that helps consumers live eco-friendly.

“There are two kinds of companies,” Ms. Jensen said, “ones that are genuinely dedicated to these issues and incorporate them into every aspect of their business, and then other companies trying to put a varnish on their business in the form of putting a few green techniques here and there.”

Some critics say that marketing — not any environmental impulse per se — is the reason local ingredients are touted at spas from the Napa Valley to the Maine Coast.

“Putting the label ‘organic’ or ‘local’ on a product allows a vendor to charge more, irregardless of supply and demand,” said James E. McWilliams, the author of “A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America.” “There is a psychological factor at work here as well. When a company can claim they are going local, it conveys a sense of virtue, that what they are doing is natural and pure, and that their behavior is alternative and even elite. These are values that a lot of consumers today crave.”

Heather Stephenson, 34, favors buying local wherever she travels, as well as in San Francisco, her base. “One of the best things you can do in terms of the planet is to seek out things that are sourced close to home,” said Ms. Stephenson, a founder of Ideal Bite, a Web site about ways to go green. Her body has been polished from regional grape seeds at Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa in California, exfoliated with Javanese coffee in Bali, and massaged with volcanic rocks from Costa Rica.

Some green advocates question whether such destination-spa treatments, however carefully sourced, are eco-friendly at all. “Using local materials in a spa setting is a great idea,” said Ms. Jensen of Low Impact Living. “But it’s kind of silly when you think about the carbon emissions associated with people flying 3,000 miles to get to the spa, versus the supposed savings using local materials, wraps and lotion.”

Ms. Stephenson, who visits roughly five spas a year, doesn’t see a contradiction. “The fact is that people go on a vacation,” she said. “We can do that in a way that gives us a healthy experience for ourselves, but also wakes us up to experiencing the things that that culture provides, and gives us an appreciation for the natural world.”

Home-grown experiences are part of what destination spas sell. The spa at Stoweflake Mountain Resort in Stowe, Vt., offers a Vermont Maple Sugar Body Polish using local maple syrup. Tell a tale of a land or its people, and patrons will come — many spas hope.

Sometimes a marketable idea is discovered where it’s least expected. During construction at the Sundara Inn and Spa in Wisconsin Dells, Wis., the former owner, Kelli Trumble, lamented how she had sand in everything, said Tara Duarte, the director of operations at Sundara, including “every pair of shoes and boots and all over her car.”

“Yet, the sand was a pretty mix of reds and golds,” Ms. Duarte added, “and it had such an even consistency that she thought it was the sort of thing you’d find in body polishes.”

So Ms. Trumble put some sandstone into a baggie and had it analyzed at a lab. When it turned out to be sandstone of an ancient Cambrian variety, Sandstone Body Polishes soon appeared at the spa.

Designing signature services based around local ingredients sets spas apart from the competition, said Melinda Taschetta-Millane, the editor in chief of Skin Inc. magazine, a trade publication for spa professionals. “They find that if they use one of these indigenous ingredients, it helps their identity and gives their spa a distinctive mark.”

Competition is fierce with roughly 14,615 spas nationwide, up from 10,128 in 2004, according to the spa association.

As a result, spas are concocting increasingly offbeat (some might say outlandish) offerings, looking to nearby vineyards, deserts and rock formations for ingredients to slather, spritz and rub onto willing bodies.

ESSpa Kozmetika, a spa near downtown Pittsburgh, doles out hot chocolate, brownies and dark-chocolate samples in the waiting room to draw attention to its $140 Stimulating Hot Cocoa Facial and $140 Hot Chocolate Body Wrap. (What the spa doesn’t advertise is that although it gets its chocolate from a local ice cream shop, the cocoa beans are from Africa.)

Customers who choose the Rosemary and Grape Seed Foot Scrub at the spa at Auberge du Soleil in Napa Valley are greeted with a glass of 2002 Barlow merlot and tasting notes: “The balanced fruit with subtle earth and herbal notes in the merlot are wonderfully brought to life by the complementary aromatics of grape seeds and rosemary in the foot treatment.”

Spa-goers shouldn’t assume that locals have traditionally given themselves facials or wrapped their limbs in, say, a blueberry mash just because a treatment’s star ingredient is indigenous. “The Hawaiians didn’t really do a papaya scrub, although you do have papaya in Hawaii,” said Sylvia Sepielli, the owner of Sylvia Planning and Design, a spa design and consulting firm in Sedona, Ariz. In her opinion, spas that try to connect their treatments to “local healing culture” are misleading.

It is possible that discovering local ingredients at a spa will have an impact on a person’s behavior once they return home, Mr. McWilliams said.

“Maybe ‘green lite’ will turn into ‘green heavy,’ ” he said. “But the most environmentally-friendly thing we can do is reduce our consumer spending dramatically, and a spa is a dramatic luxury expense.”

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The use of chocolate in cosmetics started merely as means to trigger a sensorial experience, as most products from a few years ago contained chocolate-flavored chemicals exclusively and not an ounce of real chocolate. As the studies about the internal effects of dark chocolate progressed (flavonoids, anti-oxidants, happiness hormones, you know all that stuff), a few entrepreneurial, creative minds decided that chocolate would have positive effects when used externally as a beauty aid. Susan Kim, founder of Asiana, a home-spa natural cosmetics company, says that “it was safe to assume that chocolate was good when topically applied,” as the less refined it was, the more anti-oxidants it contained. So spas started introducing chocolate treatments that would smooth out the skin and hydrate it and new cosmetics companies introduced real chocolate alongside other natural elements like honey, clay, algae, fruit purees in some of their products. Studies that tried to extract information about the effects of topical use of chocolate or cocoa powder have not been very conclusive, but that does not prevent us from enjoying it more than ever.

We have selected a few beauty products that have real chocolate, cocoa powder or cocoa butter in their composition and we tested them to see if they have a purely olfactory role or if they actually moisturize and soothe the skin.

Working our way from top to toes, let’s stop first and evaluate the lip products available on the market. Joey New York offers dual ended Professional Collagen Building Lip Perks, coffee scented pencils that will awaken the senses while giving you a lip boost. Of course, our pick from the collection is the Brazilian Coffee with A Hint of Cocoa, which is a dark caramel lipstick with a hint of pink. Caffeine caffeine caffeine, without ingesting one gulp. They also offer DeLIPcious balms among which they had to include a cocoa diva inspiredly named Chocolate Dipped Strawberries. The name alone will bring temptation a step closer to home.

A special product that I particularly enjoyed due to the fact that it actually has an effect on my permanently cracked, rather large lips is Ganache for Lips, a stick balm made with real Scharffen Berger chocolate, beeswax, and various natural extracts, essential oils and vitamin E. Created by Patricia West who was trying to cope with her chemotherapy-induced fatigue through aromatherapy, the miraculous lip balm comes in 9 flavors now: Chocolate Peppermint, Chocolate Raspberry, Chocolate Hazelnut, Mocha Latte, Chocolate Orange, Lemon Mousse, Chocolate Mousse and Chocolate Marzipan and Vanilla Mousse. I generally don’t use lip products because they make my lips even drier, but this balm has maintained them moist, non-greasy and most of all, tasty. No one touches my Ganache Raspberry!

Lush, the famously über-playful and creative company has a chocolate lip balm as well. Nested in a round box, the Lush Whipstick contains Dutch chocolate, oil and wheatgerm oils, carnauba and beeswax and it’s flavored with orange and tangerine. Girly and gourmet at the same time, it makes for an excellent purse buddy.

After the lips comes the body. And for the body, we have scrubs first and foremost, as I have learned that exfoliation precedes any cleansing in the spa world. Bella Lucce’s lovely Peruvian Chocolate Scrub that smells of genuine milk chocolate is made of pressed cocoa butter and coconut oil with gentle pure cane sugar which sloughs the dead cells. Made with French cocoa absolute and organic, Dagoba fair trade Peruvian cocoa, it is a generous and entirely natural treat for your body. You will notice the results are amazing and that natural is the way to go.

Origins recently added a Cocoa Therapy™ line to their already famous products. Their body-buffing scrub is made with cocoa extract, walnut shells and apricot seeds cushioned in cocoa butter, scaring the dead cells away with just one look. Your skin could not feel any smoother and brighter and you couldn’t feel fresher after your encounter with cocoa.

The Merry Chocoholic is a newly arrived company on the chocolate-dependent scene and they offer lots of cocoa-based cosmetic products from all over the country that you can put on your bathroom shelves without feeling guilty. They only sell a Chocolate Silk Brown Sugar Scrub under the company’s name and I have to say it smells delicious. I almost sunk my teeth in it when I opened it the first time, the second time and the third time. The brown sugar combined with shea butter, sunflower oil and cocoa butter is gentle yet effective in its removal of sagging cells. We salute the merry chocoholics.

Now, the following scrub is Asiana’s Mocha Peppermint made with Dutch chocolate and grinded coffee and it’s one of the best scrubs I have yet to see. Inspired loosely by the peppermint patty, this energizing scrub cleans the skin, invigorates it with the caffeine contained by both the cocoa and the coffee and gives you a kick of energy you never thought possible through the sheer sense of smell. The anti-oxidant grinded coffee exfoliates and stimulates the micro-cellular circulation, while the oils of jojoba, sweet almond and grape seed provide healing benefits. But what makes it so distinctive is the uplifting smell of the peppermint with a discreet hint of cinnamon that seems to propel its effects to the next level. The concoction is almost 100% pure, with just a few touches of chemical enhancer and, as the label reads “it was tested only on friends and family.”

After a good scrub, you definitely need a good wash to remove all the cocoa from the already love-intoxicated skin cells. For those who prefer to use the soap bars and like to soak in the tub, the choices are varied. Bella Lucce offers a Peruvian Chocolate Moisturizing Syrup enriched with a dash of honey. You just need to pour some in your bathtub and you’ll soon swim in a sea of dreams. Origins also offers an energy-boosting body bar that will leave your skin, oh-so-soft. Crabtree & Evelyn, the well-known beauty company that has been using natural ingredients since its very inception, has a very softening and aromatic soap bar from cocoa butter, nutmeg and cardamom in its collection. The spices do not overpower you with their aromas, however they leave a soft trail of the exotic on your skin.

Asiana knows what good life is all about as it made a bath milk with real Ghirardelli dark chocolate, dark cocoa powder and coconut cream– all those crazy anti-oxidants running towards your skin and yelling “Kill the aging agents”- and bottled it up in a huge container for your shopping convenience. When you pour it into the water, you can see the flakes of chocolate melting away and working surreptitiously towards a clean and healthy skin.

Last but not least Lush, the company not the drunk, gives us the Ma Bar, which is a toffee and chocolate block topped with a sugar cube that will melt into a bubble bath once it’s crumbled in the running water. It is jokingly marketed as a gift for your mother when you have budget constraints. It is fun and it smells like dessert (orange chocolate, toffee, honey, yum), and like the Lush catalog suggest, you may get yourself one while you are at it. Mom will surely love it, but she deserves much more than a nice bath.

If you are in the shower, you need a good body wash or gel to clear out that chocolate scrub and we have just the things for you. Philip B, a celebrity darling when it comes to beauty products, has a Chocolate Milk Body Wash that will even get your children excited about the prospect of a bath. A blend of toning cocoa butter, rejuvenating oat protein and wheat amino acids and moisturizing aloe, this wash will treat your skin like royalty. Jaqua Beauty has in store (The Bath and Body Works one) for you a Mint Chocolate Hydrating Shower Syrup. It contains Vitamins A, E and B5 that will exfoliate, condition and soften the skin, a nice peppermint extract that will cool you off and a ginseng extract that will regenerate and replenish texture. Again Lush proposes a fun product called Sonic Death Monkey Shower Gel that is infused with herbal tea from the Caribbean, herbal coffee (hm!) from Jamaica, cocoa, lime, orange and vanilla. Thank God, this eclectic mixture doesn’t end up smelling like its name but far more exotic than that. The coffee and citrus flavors will wake you up no matter how early in the morning it is.

Many people have dry skin and not even a seriously moisturizing shower gel or soap can fix that. That is why the lotions and body butters exist in this world. The ones that we tried and that made a lasting impression on our not-so-toned skin deserve kudos as there are not many lotions in the world that would surprise us easily. Jaqua’s Mint Chocolate Sinfully Rich Cocoa Body Butter contains the same ingredients as the shower syrup more or less but it has a considerable quantity of cocoa butter that smoothes out the skin and gives it a rich glow. Crabtree & Evelyn’s Cocoa Butter, Nutmeg & Cardamom Body Butter is just as aromatic and sensual as the body bar, but with a more persistent and deeper scent. You will imagine you are traveling in a caravan on the Spice Route after you immerse yourself in the rich, peachy cream. Joey New York comes to the rescue of the lifeless cells with its very own White Chocolate Body Shimmer, a non-greasy body oil that glides over the skin leaving a glowing finish. White chocolate supplies the active ingredient, the macadamia nut oil represents the healing and reviving agent of the lotion leaving a gentle glowing finish. Bella Lucce’s Bliss Crème is rich in cocoa butter and French cacao absolute and smells like a decadent portion of milk chocolate, hovering sweet and light over your tegument. It nourishes and protects, while it makes you totally unproductive as you sit round entranced, sniffing your delicious smelling epidermis. Origins’ cocoa therapy ™ Deeply nourishing body butter also contains pure cocoa that helps fortify the skin’s youthful appearance, alongside vitamins A, B, C and E and minerals like Potassium, Magnesium, Iron, Calcium and Copper. To top it up, it boasts a dose of Theobroma Grandiflorum- also known as Cupuacu, a tree that is related to the cocoa tree - that helps repair the skin’s moisture barrier. I have not heard about this one before, but I’ll take their word for it.

In the end, there comes the marching band of chocolate hued but not really so chocolaty cosmetics that we all love to use. They are called the fake tanners. The make you look like chocolate but have none in them. Despite this, we still like to consider them part of our big chocolate family, especially now that the sun is playing hide and seek behind the clouds.

Bourjois, the famed beauty products French company, is launching two new products in the USA this fall that will be found for sure in Sephora boutiques. Petit Dessert du Teint (literally meaning ‘little dessert for the complexion’) is an illuminating gel that guarantees a natural caramel skin tone. It is very light, it suits all skin tones and its vanilla aroma will bring to mind the dessert it promises. The other brilliant product is Delice de Poudre (‘powdery delight’), a bronzing powder, which comes in the compact shape of chocolate squares in a thin box with a kabuki brush, and it has two different shades for lighter and darker skin types.

Fake Bake is another wildly acclaimed self-tanner that has even been awarded the Best Self-Tanner in the United Kingdom by Women’s Cosmetic Guide. Celebrities use it and mortals are dying for it, although its patent is still pending. The product has a built-in ‘chocolate’ color guide – a dark temporary color that allows you to see exactly where you are applying the product, so there are no dark spots, patches and dubious-looking marks, but a uniform, glorious tan. Just apply it at night before you go to bed and rinse it in the morning with warm water. Ta daa.

There is one more particular chocolate product that I’d like to tell you about now although it bends the category of cosmetic or culinary. It is probably more fit for our Sex and Chocolate issue that will sometime come soon, but I would rather tell you about it now. Chocolate Dust for Lovers from Green Dragon Herbals doesn’t really need an explanation for what it does. You just sprinkle it on your beloved on and you nibble away. Come to think about it, since it doesn’t have sugar, you can sprinkle it on your palm and nibble away when you really crave chocolate but prefer to think you are on a diet. It’s fun and it comes with a feather to help you in your endeavors.

 

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