Beauty on budget, L.A.-style
It’s been a PR campaign on overdrive, aimed at flinging open the doors of pricey spas to the belt-tightening Costco crowd.
“The spa lifestyle is not only essential to maintaining one’s health and well-being, but it’s now available and affordable to everyone,” claimed one of the Spa Week campaign’s numerous e-mails, touting cut-rate spa treatments as the antidote for our wrinkle-creating economic worries.
I started to hit delete, then thought: Can’t we all use a little TLC right now? When money gets tight, that organic aroma facial is apt to be the first thing dropped.
This month, from April 13 to 19, hundreds of spas across the country -- including dozens in Los Angeles -- are offering $50 treatment specials. I scanned the list -- at www.spaweek.com “> www.spaweek.com -- and found everything from botox to aromatherapy, laser treatments to body scrubs.
The idea is to “drive in new clientele,” an e-mail to spa owners said. They hope we’ll love that $50 massage so much, we’ll keep coming when the price goes back up to $100.
But here in L.A. -- home of the $6 Vietnamese manicure, $9.99 Chinese foot rub and $35 Thai massage -- beauty bargains abound week in, week out.
So I took a “spa day” tour through ethnic L.A. to see how much pampering I could buy for the price of one high-end massage.
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I began my beauty trek Tuesday night with a stop at Daengki Beauty Spa, at the edge of a Koreatown strip mall, alongside a restaurant, a cellphone store and a pair of empty, shuttered shops.
Inside, the receptionist suggested the $100 special, a 90-minute treatment that includes a scrub, facial, scalp massage and deep-tissue rubdown with “French beauty oil.”
She ushered me into a spotless, airy locker room, where a gaggle of naked Korean ladies sprawled on the heated floor watching big-screen TV.
I shed my clothes -- then tried to shed my inhibitions -- and entered a giant mirrored room with hot and cold whirlpools, a sauna, a steam room and a bank of showers. Alcoves held a row of massage tables, flanked by middle-aged Korean women wearing nothing but blue scrubbing mitts and black underwear.
Daengki is open only to women. Still, to say I felt awkward is putting it mildly. But no one even glanced my way as I steamed, soaked and sweated. They were too busy scrubbing their feet, conditioning their hair, standing before the full-length mirrors rubbing lotion on their . . . well, everywhere.
The air smelled like sweet steam, with a hint of kimchi.
It was perfectly relaxing. I felt like a child, trusting the practiced hands of this foreign woman, in the same way my children trusted me when they were babies and I’d lift them from the tub and lotion them head to toe before putting them to sleep.
Spa owner Jinyoung Noh asked if I had enjoyed my massage. She didn’t know then that I was from the newspaper. “When I see someone here who is not Korean, I want to make sure they are satisfied,” she said, because few of the spa patrons or employees speak English.
Daengki is one of Koreatown’s oldest spas. Public baths “are part of our culture,” Noh said, because most homes in Korea don’t have private showers. That explained why the women seemed so comfortable in their bodies. I envied their ease.
No one seemed worried about stretch marks, or paunches or sagging parts. While I was too embarrassed to even look at my own reflection in the mirror.
When we finished, I realized I had just done the first nude interview of my career.
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The next morning I headed to Vinita’s Beauty and Threading Studio in Cerritos, where Vinita gave me a perfect eyebrow arch with the ancient Indian art of threading for $10, and in 10 minutes. She owns four shops -- in Cerritos, Tustin, Westwood and Beverly Hills.
“I don’t have many Indian customers,” she said. “They learn to do this as girls growing up, so they do each other now.” Her busiest salon is in Beverly Hills, where women who can no longer afford $50 eyebrow artistes have discovered the economy of threading.
I ended the day in San Gabriel, at Tibetan Herbal Feet Soak on Valley Boulevard, where David gave me a $20 foot massage and lesson in reflexology, mapping my foot-body connection -- rather painfully.
“This your liver; this your kidney; this your lower back,” he explained. I struggled to understand his accented English, and felt rude when I kept asking him to repeat. He suggested a back massage, because the lower-back pressure point hurt me so much.
He handled the foot treatment with such authority, I found myself following orders. He directed me to a massage table in a crowded storage area. I was too tense to relax. I should have stopped at the foot massage.
Still, I considered my foray a success. I discovered that for less than the cost of a 50-minute massage in a luxurious private room at Burke Williams, I could find a day of beauty in multicultural L.A. -- minus the fluffy white robe, New Age music and lavender candles. Sure, it took me outside my comfort zone. But no one laughed when I tried to soak my feet in the runoff water at Daengki spa. And Vinita knew I was lying when I said threading didn’t hurt; she handed me a tissue to wipe the tears from my eyes.
This was my turn to feel like a stranger, to have my intimate rituals complicated by unfamiliar languages and customs.
But my eyebrows looked great, my feet felt like I was walking on clouds, and my skin was as soft as a baby’s bottom.
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