SPA WATCH | Ten Thousand Waves, Santa Fe

I AM on edge. Winter in the Midwest is something else. Unlike any other nightmare I've ever experienced. There's no cafe culture, so my only outlet on days and times that aren't Friday or Saturday night -- the only time people in this part of the world will go out and deviate from a soul-destroying schedule of work, gym, sleep, work, gym, sleep -- is... well, no escape at all. Because it's THE GYM.

Joy.

That sounds like just the thing to make me less depressed about winter in this place. No, it really does. Swear I didn't actually get teary eyed on the flight back to Chicago from Vail in January.

As evidenced by that last statement, the trick to surviving winter here is to not spend it here. 

Might I recommend one such place that'll make you never want to come back... It's a Japanese-style onsen (bath/spa) just north of Santa Fe in the southwest called Ten Thousand Waves.

Yes, it's a bit crunchy.

Sure, there are some creepy men. (But newsflash: there are creepy men EVERYWHERE there are women wearing less than a hazmat suit.) 

It's also serenely and wonderfully woodsy, in/on the edge of Santa Fe State Park, so you can go on a hike right from your front door.

The baths (women's and mixed. They closed the men-only bath. It appears men get even creepier when left alone) are surrounded by minimal oriental, wooden decks with outdoor cold showers, plunge pools and saunas just an amble away. If you're up for it, splurge on one of the private huts with baths, showers and private decks. They're pretty sweet and run about $45 for 90-minutes per person (plus, no creepy men unless you bring them with you). You feel like a movie star renting one of the private huts, I swear.

And even during the winter it's a pleasant 55-65 during the day and 45-35 at night. Not a mind-numbing 20 below ZERO (that's zero in Farenheit, not Celsius, so a whopping 52 BELOW FREEZING, common in the Midwest). Sometimes there's snow, in which case you can do a nudie dive bomb into the powder before running back into the sauna. 

Thankfully, for now, there's no on-site bar. But we heard there's a sake bar in the works on our last trip which could make things a bit more interesting... or sloppy or both.

If you don't want to stay in Santa Fe proper (and I feel you. It can be suffocatingly touristy), there are 12 (or is it 13?) lodges on premise that are the BOMB and feel proper Japanese. We staying in one of the smallest on offer, and it was amazing. Futon-style beds, wooden screens, kimonos and slippers, hibachi grill, private patio with super cool Japanese-style gardens (rock and otherwise) and... drumroll...

Japanese toilets. The ones that can do everything, even, I suspect, your taxes. 

Early in the morning, before the main baths were open, we'd creep out in our canvas kimonos and slippers in the morning dew and scurry up the winding stone pathway to the women's pool -- open for all lodgers before the rest of the spa opened -- where we'd stew in the hot bath while reading books and drinking tea we'd snuck up from the cabin. 

We also took advantage of the spa menu, something I highly recommend doing along with bathing and sauna-ing. Not least of all because they have real therapists there. No 18 year-olds with icy hand who went to massage school because they didn't know what else to do. 

My masseur had hands like Gerard Depardieu's -- huge, in a word. And he was French to boot. Maybe he was his cousin. Or brother...

I think one paw covered the girth of my back. Mr. Magic Paws was In. To. His. Work. And I came out the other end as soft as a stick of butter sat on the counter all day. No more knots in my back. Or neck. Or anywhere. 

I'm still on the hunt for someone with similar talent (and hand girth) locally. My last massage here was given by a man who had hands the size, softness and strength of a five-year old girl's. Not exactly Magic Paws. 

The only downer (other than aforementioned creepy dudes) is the lack of on-site food. Fair enough as they only have 12 lodges and everyone comes there for the atmosphere, treatments and amenities. But they wouldn't go amiss with something, even a small sushi bar for the lodgers. Because, man oh man, were we hoooongry (so hungry we were almost hangry (hungry angry) sometimes and didn't feel like driving into town and sifting through the tourist trappy restos.

That aside, I'd happily take up permanent residence (at least to winter) here and no doubt would look, feel, smell (stress makes me stink), sleep et al better.

DETAILS:

Japanese style baths and spa above Santa Fe in the Sangre de Cristo mountains in/near Santa Fe State Park. Beautiful, manicured landscape done in, duh, Japanese style that weaves itself up and amid the mountain range's foothills. It's wooded, quiet and private. There are several public baths and saunas and indvidual bath houses. 12 private, minimal (but gorgeous) Japanese lodges that vary in size and amenities. Treatments available from massage to facials. The prices are pretty standard in the US, meaning everything is priced as, sadly, a luxury. 

Located just a mile north of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Lodging runs from $119 to $269, treatments run $65 to $179 and hot baths runs from $18.80 to $49. However, the communal hot baths, sauna, etc. are complimentary to lodgers. 

Ten Thousand Waves

LUST-HAVE | Scotch Naturals WaterColors

3-FREE is a pretty common catch phrase in the world of nails nowadays. No one wants toluene, formaldehyde or or DBP in their nail polish anymore. Um, fair enough.

We've seen Priti, Sula, Rescue Beauty, Ginger and Liz, Jessica, Zoya, Mavala... In fact, you can probably find more non-toxic polishes than toxic, although many of the biggest offenders are still the biggest names in the beauty.

The latest in non-toxic, natural nailcare is Scotch Naturals, a collection of 13 water-based polishes from an Arizona mom who first created non-toxic Hopscotch Kids nail polish for little girls.

In fact, the brand has such faith in its product that it claims to give you healthier nails the longer you use it (but be sure to use their remover too instead of super-drying acetone).

After reading the ingredient lists of their products, we tend to agree. The WaterColors ingredients are: water, acrylic polymer emulsion, and non toxic colorants. Seriously. THREE INGREDIENTS. The Polish Remover ingredients? water, tall oil fatty acids & alcohols (plant based), nonionic surfactant, organic buffer. 

Natural nail colour does tend to be harder to apply, take longer to dry and be quicker to come off and/or chip, but Scotch Naturals gives some handy tips to keep it looking better longer on this page.

Ceasefire and Hot Toddy are on-trend putty/mushroom/greige/khaki colours. There are some brilliant blues, a fiery red, black, a magenta and a bevy of nudes for the non-adventurous. All in, a well-rounded capsule collection.

Good for your nails taken neat.

Speaking of naturals... stay tuned for a little side project we're working on a very chic gardening e-commerce site... Kale & Cole {for the hip garden}. We can't wait to launch it!

BEAUTY OP-ED | News flash... real women come in ALL sizes, not just plus-sizes

SINCE THE deaths of two South American models caused by complications related to anorexia, the weight of models and other aspirational types – actresses, TV hosts, singers, reality TV stars et al – has come under fire and rightfully so. The British Fashion Council set up the Model Health Inquiry. Madrid Fashion Week banned models with BMIs under 18. Essentials Magazine has decided to use REAL WOMEN instead of models and actresses in all future issues. But, man, is it about time we women -- REAL WOMEN of all shapes, sizes, colors, creeds -- took issue with the misuse of that term -- real women.  

Because a woman is scarily thin doesn't make her any less of a real woman, in my book, than one who happens to be scarily overweight. It's true that the relentless march of under-nourished, under-aged and over-airbrushed girls that peer out at female-kind from every nook and cranny of visual popular culture is un-nerving at the best of times and horribly damaging – even fatal – at the worst..

But, is the backlash against them – this defining non-skinny women as the sole real women – the right way either? Sure, it's easy to indignantly smirk at the wafer-thin women as pawns in male master-minded industries, reducing them to mere objects in our minds, open game to our hate and scorn. But does being clinically obese make you more real than a woman who suffers from starving herself? How about those who don't happen to be the average size (14) but don't fit into sample sizes (0) either? Those who pleasantly fall into that no-man's land of size 6 to 8 (what I grew up believing was the ideal thanks to my Sweet Valley High books in Junior High)? Are those in that category also not considered real? And why such a narrow bloody definition based on nothing but an arbitrary (and believe me, they are arbitrary) trouser size?

It's time to stop the binary thinking, ladies.

An either-or mentality has never gotten anyone anywhere in this world. Being underweight can be unhealthy and wreak havoc on the collective female psyche when constantly championed as the female ideal. But, on the flip side, when the average size of a nation (I'm looking at you in all your sweatpant-clad glory, America, and a population where 6 out of every 10 people is overweight) starts to cost healthcare upwards of $150 billion annually, we need to man (and woman) up and realize there's nothing inherently better or more real about being bigger either.

It seems while our ideal keeps shrinking, our idea of what's average keeps ballooning so that our sense of normalcy is bordering on surreal. The bigger we get the smaller we want to be, making our aspirations and our state of reality equally dangerous.  

I often hear the name of Marilyn Monroe invoked in defense of the plus-sized American woman – "Marilyn Monroe was a size 16. That says it all", said Rosanne Barr, giving women on the top end of the spectrum carte blanche to continue scorning smaller women. But she's wrong. Not only are vanity sizes de riguer (a size 4 of 2010 is approx. the same size as a 1980s size 8 and so on) but Monroe had a 22-inch waist on a good day and 23-incher on a bad day. Clearly not the measurement of today's average woman. So stop it, ladies, and face the music! We all come in different shapes and sizes and there's no justifying one's weight and worth as a real woman because of a number on a scale or invoking the name of Miss Monroe to assuage delicate egos!

You're no less of a woman if you're a size 2 than a size 12 than a size 6 than a size 24. End of story.

I agree that airbrushing, the cult of skinny (esp. paired with bolt-on boobs, surgery, injections et al) and all that nonsense is, well, nonsense, but so is pretending that you have to fit an equally absurd set of criteria to be deemed a REAL WOMAN.

Because you know what? We're all real women or so said that very crucial anatomy lesson in high school health class (and if you don't know what that means, I can't help you). Some have been more blessed by the genetic gods than others and some (many nowadays) cheat. So what? Some might have eating disorders. Some might be naturally thinner or thicker. Some might be athletic, short, tall, round, lean... whatever. There's no one-body-fits-all for womankind so this bandying about of the term real women is as mystifying as it is damaging and delusional. 

Help me think of a better term for women who don't work as models or actresses. Vain, eating-disordered, carved-up-by-a-plastic-surgeon's-knife as all those ladies might be, they're still real women so let's cut the bulls**t use of that term as a way to grab the public's limited attention and find something a bit better suited, shall we?