Bikes 101: electric vs pedal & best cycling gear
Country & Town House | 21 Oct 2020
Caroline Phillips puts an electric and a pedal bike through their paces, plus some elite cycling gear tips…
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Create an at-home spa with Esther Cato Wellness
The Luxury Channel | 25 Sep 2020
If you want a masseur with magic fingers who’s bookable throughout the year, Esther Cato is your lady. It’s not just that this healer-meets-ultimate-stress-buster-meets-masseur is so available. It’s also that she’s so good. So thank your lucky stars that government restrictions have just lifted, and book to see Esther in your London home for a deep tissue therapeutic massage. Or bag her for a pregnancy massage. Or a Swedish one.
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Health Heroes
Country & Town House | 16 Apr 2020
Meet the people who will get you shipshape in mind, body and soul.
Deep under Regent Street, you’ll find yourself immersed in the Hotel Café Royal’s specialist Watsu pool with small floats attached to your shins. Here, Steve Karle guides you in an hour- long underwater dance of stretching, shiatsu, joint mobilisation and craniosacral work. You’ll feel weightless, and will leave the pool deliciously spaced out, your aches eased. Then you’ll bliss out again with the other parts of this Four Elements treatment: a body massage, hot stones and scalp massage.
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Escape to Somatheeram Ayurveda Village in Kerala
The Luxury Channel | 26 Apr 2019
There’s a Chinese lady sitting at lunch slavered in a red face pack. Fabric is wound around her crown, like bandages, and she’s wearing a green overall and sipping fresh pineapple juice. Nearby a Russian man wanders around the garden sporting banana, egg white and mango painted on his face. He has also just enjoyed a Thalapothichil treatment, in which the head is covered with herbal paste and topped off with a lotus leaf — a procedure that’s said to be good for depression and stress.
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Beauty Test
Country & Town House | 1 Dec 2018
Facialogy? What’s that? It’s a combo of a blissful Vaishaly Signature Facial with a relaxing, health-promoting reflexology treatment.
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Soukya: the Bangalore health retreat drawing a starry clientele — and interest from the NHS
FT Weekend | 29 Apr 2018
I am lying on a wooden massage bed as two women rub my naked body with hot pouches of cooked rice, milk and medicinal herbs. They massage in tandem my legs, hip joints and up to my neck. A little gloop escapes the poultice bags each time and soon my body is covered with a gluey white residue. This is navarakizhi, a treatment claimed to reduce joint stiffness and relieve depression.
I’m at Soukya, a health retreat outside Bangalore that offers traditional Indian cures for conditions from hay fever to diabetes and strives to “restore the natural balance of your mind, body and spirit”.
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‘I tried sensory therapy for my past trauma’
Healthista | 9 Nov 2015
There was that time my house was hit by a tornado when I was at home. And then there was my physically and emotionally abusive childhood, at the hands of my mentally ill mother. Yes, I’m a good subject for trauma therapy. But actually nearly everybody has suffered trauma. You don’t have to be a war veteran or a survivor of incest or of a car crash. Even seemingly benign experiences can be traumatic for some – it depends on your attitude – from that nasty knee surgery to root canal treatment at the dentist or a ride on a roller-coaster.
View Web pageDial H for Healers
Tatler | 18 Jun 2014
Mornings were worst. I would wake with lead in my veins, a jackboot pressing on my chest and my body rigid, as if set in formaldehyde. I’d be beset by a terrible inner loneliness and desolation, paralysed with foreboding. I became destructive, self-sabotaging and impulsive, forgetting that I’m a successful, loved woman with a good life and an exciting future.
This is depression. A crippling depression that has been with me all my life. So who would have thought that the best help would come in the form of a spa therapist?
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A cut above
Mayfair | 3 Jan 2014
Rossano Ferretti is that rare breed: a hairdresser-cum-architect with a good splash of the designer in him. In fact, he has designed twenty salons across the globe – from New York to New Delhi – and is a world-renowned crimper. He’s known for a way of cutting hair that’s not simply described as a ‘haircut’ but instead is dubbed ‘The Method’ – a unique and patented technique of cutting tresses that apparently has something to do with snipping the hair based on its ‘natural fall in motion.’
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Tatler Spa Guide 2013
Tatler | 18 Jul 2013
Chiva-som, Thailand – The mother of them all. Chiva remains triumphantly at the top of its game. Come here to scrub your chakras, give up sleeping pills or smoking (or both), lose your post-baby lubber or have accelerated subdermal therapy (ultrasound does battle with cellulite) in the medi-spa. There’s a daily schedule that’s more tightly packed than a tin of chickpeas, from vinyasa flow yoga to gyrokinesis (pilates meets ballet). Plus it’s all run with Swiss-style efficiency.
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Condé Nast Traveller Spa Guide 2013 – Chiva Som
Condé Nast Traveller | 18 Jun 2013
Chiva Som is known as a Club Med for Holistic Junkies, and we Brits love the place. There’s something about the routine and the rules which is school-day reassuring. Cameras and mobiles aren’t allowed in public, and there’s no alcohol befre 6pm. You can smoke, but only in the designated spot (a favourite with Kate Moss).
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Glamorous, grown-up… and bulimic
Easy Living | 19 Jun 2012
I’m at a reunion dinner for some of my erstwhile classmates: ten of us – including a psychotherapist, a doctor and a lawyer – now 50 years old, successful and glamorous. Conversation falls to the topic of food and bodies. Then something startling is revealed. Seven of us admit to having suffered from eating disorders at school – bulimia, compulsive overeating or anorexia.
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