Friday, September 12, 2008

The Neverending Quest for the Perfect....Massage Lotion?

You would not think that massage lotion would be a difficult thing to settle on at a spa, but believe me, when the egos and opinions of seven different massage therapists are in play, it can become a hornet's nest.

We had been using Soothing Touch for a while, which seemed to be a great choice for both clients and therapists alike, and everything was hunky-dory. And before I went to go and knock everything out of whack, I mayhap should have just asked myself, "If it ain't broke, why try to fix it?" Well, the reason WHY was that Soothing Touch was not organic. It contains such chemicals as Diazolidinyl Urea, a compound that was recently classified as IARC-1 by the International Agency for Research on Cancer - IARC 1 means it is a known human carcinogen - as well as parabens (both methyl and propyl), as well as TEA stearate.

And I'll be damned if all I'm going to do is talk the talk and not walk the walk. That is in no way, shape, or form the kind of person I am. So, I decided to stop getting Soothing Touch and go get Bon Vital. Oh my good Lord, what a hot mess that was. Everybody hated it, saying it was slimy, smelled like old sweat, you name it, that was a complaint about that product. "But it is organic!" I protested. "Well, it's unusable," was the reply.

So I hunted around some more and found a wonderful, all-organic brand called Sacred Earth Botanicals. What a great combination! Vegan massage lotion, only the purest and most natural ingredients in it, and when I got some for the staff to try, they LOVED it! The best of both worlds, right? Well, sort of.

I was afraid they would like it, actually, because that sucker is 45% more expensive than Soothing Touch and twice as expensive as Bon Vital (yes, the sweat-smelling organic lotion). At $54.95 per gallon, this stuff will put me in the poorhouse, so to speak.

Well, what can I say? It's important to me that we use only the best products on our clients, they deserve nothing less than that commitment. If we represent ourselves as an organic spa, then doggone it, we're going to be one, even if my massage lotion costs double. So that's what we did...we've arrived at the end of our quest, we've passed Go a hundred times, we are sipping, at long last, out of our grail.

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