LONDON’S MOST UNUSUAL BEAUTY & SPA TREATMENTS
We Test the Capital’s Most Weird and Wonderful Treatments
From being whacked with branches and plunged into icy water, to salmon sperm injections and having blood extracted, spruced and replaced, London is not shy with its weird and wonderful treatments.
Gone are the days of plonking cucumber slices on your eyes, as the capital seeks increasingly extreme and exciting ways to feel good.
We test some of the most quirky treatments to give you the lowdown, below.
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Parenie Treatment - extreme heat, ice and being whacked with branches
Being whacked with branches, braving hot and cold extremes, and being scrubbed with honey, salt and leaves isn’t your typical spa experience. But Banya No.1 isn’t your typical spa, as we find out.
Everybody from Kate Moss and Justin Bieber to Emilia Clarke and Liv Tyler have been flocking to the London bathhouse and wellness spa to experience its authentic, Russian Banya, Perenie and wellness treatments. And after our exhilarating, three-hour experience, we can see why.
We bounce between our private booth - glugging back litres of water we’ve sweated out - to the 700°C steam room, freezing bucket showers, icy plunge pool and therapists occasionally take us off to hit us with eucalyptus, scrub us or bring us delicious, healthy dishes.
The experience is based on the thermal cycle of Hot-Cold-Rest-Repeat and we will be back - we left feeling supercharged, full of stories, and drunk from all of the sensory extremes.
Banya No.1, 404-406 Chiswick High Road, Chiswick, London W4 5TF. We had the Full Experience Spa Offer, which is £157 pp off-peak and £185 pp regular price.
24K Gold Facial
We head to a luxury, Chiswick oasis to be turned into a living Klimt painting, by having our faces covered in 24K gold.
Everybody from Naomi Campbell to Bella Hadid have embraced this opulent new beauty trend.
Gold has been used in Chinese, Indian and Arabic medicine as far back as 2500 BC and fancy, Egyptian skin-pamperer, Cleopatra was a fan of sleeping with a gold-coated mush.
After an Extreme Youth cleanser, we have Diamond Dust Microdermabrasion, and a Dermophoretic System is applied to help our skin absorb The Gold Concentrated Youth Treatment, to optimise the gold’s effect.
Finally, the 24K Gold Leaf sheets are carefully applied - I look and feel like an Egyptian Queen.
The tiny nanoparticles of gold in my skin give me a glorious, shimmery glow for around two weeks, as they reflect in the light, which immediately makes skin look brighter.
The pure gold also boosts my skin’s metabolism, deeply nourishing, tightening and strengthening it. Gold is also thought to have powerful antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties.
It’s a perfect alternative to invasive, anti-ageing treatments and is quite literally, alchemy.
The Door W4, The Hogarth Group, Airedale Ave, London W4 2NW. 24-Karat Gold Leaf Facial by DIBI Milano - £140 for 60 minutes. £350 for a course of three
The £200 Glowdry
Geologists will tell you the Atacama Desert is the driest thing in the world, but I know that the world’s driest matter is, in fact, my hair.
Luckily for me, celebrity hair stylist Gustav Fouche is a follicle alchemist, and he’s about to treat my desiccated mane to the hot new £200 Glowdry treatment at his eponymous, Notting Hill salon. It’s the secret behind many of the glossy manes, billowing along the red carpet.
He begins to carefully coat my long hair with the bespoke Hair and Recovery Elixir treatment he has mixed for my hair’s thirsty needs.
Then he places my head beneath the futuristic looking Micro Mist machine and over the next 20 minutes, I'm surrounded by sci-fi swirls of dramatic vapour, as if I'm about to be transformed into a Cyborg with great hair.
There are only a handful of these machines across the world, and this groundbreaking technology is the magic key to the treatment. It repairs, hydrates and rejuvenates hair, giving strength, suppleness and a longer lasting shine.
The heat provides the perfect osmosis, opening the hair cuticle for the light mist particles to penetrate the hair, pushing the product deeper into the locks. After the heat treatment, there is a burst of “cold fog” to close the cuticle, locking in the product for stronger, longer lasting results which had me flipping my mane like a deranged horse.
Gustav Fouche, 82 Westbourne Grove, London W2 5RT. Glowdry £200
Salmon Sperm Injections
Full disclaimer: while we love fish, we haven’t yet had a romantic experience with them on our faces. So this one isn’t a tried and tested, but needed to be included.
Known more palatably as Polynucleotide Treatments, everybody from Jennifer Aniston to Kim Kardashian have been getting salmon sperm injected into their mushes.
The small fragments of DNA and RNA from salmon balls are rich in proteins, amino acids, and omega-3s, apparently boosting collagen, accelerating healing and providing powerful hydration for firmer, brighter, younger-looking skin.
The treatment is touted as showing results after just one session, although results may vary.
Simply Clinics, Harley Street, 39 Harley Street, Floor 2, London, W1G 8QH. £290 for one session.
Ozone Therapy
I think we can all agree that oxygen is pretty high on our list of essentials. Every cell in our body needs it to function; our ability to think, feel and act relies on it as does 90% of our body’s energy production. We’d also be pretty dead, without it.
Enter stage left: Wimpole Street’s IVBOOST Clinic, which has taken this thinking to the next level, offering optimum health via complete cellular oxygenation.
The treatment delivers oxygen directly into the blood stream. Blood is gently extracted, passed through an oxidation chamber, where it is combined with an equal volume of ozone at high concentration, and then passed back into the body. This process is known as ‘one pass’. Ten passes is considered the optimum and most powerful therapy.
The therapy oxygenates the blood, which they say restores optimum cellular oxygenation to defy ageing, boost energy, raise immunity, fight infectious diseases and calm inflammation in the body.
It takes 90 to 120 minutes to fulfil a 10-pass treatment which includes passing the blood through the machine 10 times.
IVBOOST Clinic, 48 Wimpole StreetMarylebone, London, W1G 8SF. One session is £750; five sessions is £2,750; 10 sessions £4,500 and 20 sessions £7,000
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