After Laura Noss signed up to receive a weekly organic produce box from a farm near her home in Menlo Park, Calif., she decided that fruits and vegetables grown close to home taste better.
“It has opened my eyes to what is local and seasonal,” Ms. Noss said. “I now understand that what I put in my body and on my body matters.”
So she began looking for ways to go local beyond the palate. Last year, while she planned a getaway to Maui, she hunted for treatments that used indigenous ingredients at the Grand Wailea Resort Hotel and Spa. That is how she found herself being scrubbed with locally-sourced coconut and sugar, then dunked in just-harvested coconut milk — for $160 a treatment.
“It felt like it would be fresher than some of the other treatments,” said Ms. Noss, 38, the founder of Social Planets, a communications and marketing company. “I envisioned the woman going out to the tree and plucking my coconut.”
More than 28 percent of spas nationwide use local ingredients, according to a 2007 survey by the International Spa Association, a trade group for the industry. Last year, after seeing the trend take off, the association started tracking how many of the 3,000 spas in its membership use ingredients from local nature in treatments.
In an age of global warming and high gas prices, is it any wonder that more spa-goers are gravitating to blueberries, honey and even maple syrup, cultivated close by because they believe it leaves a lighter carbon footprint?
The local-food movement, popularized by writers like Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, has created an aura of authenticity around all things local. Forward-thinking spas have long included indigenous ingredients on their menus, but more spa owners have entered the game of late, now that customers will pay more for services they deem environmentally responsible.
Some spas use the local produce in unexpected ways. The Cliff House Resort and Spa in Ogunquit, Me., offers its guests a Maine blueberry body wrap for $110. You can also get a Maine Blueberry Pedicure.
That more businesses (spas included) are rushing to make greenbacks off the green-minded hasn’t escaped the notice of Jessica Jensen, a founder of Low Impact Living, an online resource that helps consumers live eco-friendly.
“There are two kinds of companies,” Ms. Jensen said, “ones that are genuinely dedicated to these issues and incorporate them into every aspect of their business, and then other companies trying to put a varnish on their business in the form of putting a few green techniques here and there.”
Some critics say that marketing — not any environmental impulse per se — is the reason local ingredients are touted at spas from the Napa Valley to the Maine Coast.
“Putting the label ‘organic’ or ‘local’ on a product allows a vendor to charge more, irregardless of supply and demand,” said James E. McWilliams, the author of “A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America.” “There is a psychological factor at work here as well. When a company can claim they are going local, it conveys a sense of virtue, that what they are doing is natural and pure, and that their behavior is alternative and even elite. These are values that a lot of consumers today crave.”
Heather Stephenson, 34, favors buying local wherever she travels, as well as in San Francisco, her base. “One of the best things you can do in terms of the planet is to seek out things that are sourced close to home,” said Ms. Stephenson, a founder of Ideal Bite, a Web site about ways to go green. Her body has been polished from regional grape seeds at Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa in California, exfoliated with Javanese coffee in Bali, and massaged with volcanic rocks from Costa Rica.
Some green advocates question whether such destination-spa treatments, however carefully sourced, are eco-friendly at all. “Using local materials in a spa setting is a great idea,” said Ms. Jensen of Low Impact Living. “But it’s kind of silly when you think about the carbon emissions associated with people flying 3,000 miles to get to the spa, versus the supposed savings using local materials, wraps and lotion.”
Ms. Stephenson, who visits roughly five spas a year, doesn’t see a contradiction. “The fact is that people go on a vacation,” she said. “We can do that in a way that gives us a healthy experience for ourselves, but also wakes us up to experiencing the things that that culture provides, and gives us an appreciation for the natural world.”
Home-grown experiences are part of what destination spas sell. The spa at Stoweflake Mountain Resort in Stowe, Vt., offers a Vermont Maple Sugar Body Polish using local maple syrup. Tell a tale of a land or its people, and patrons will come — many spas hope.
Sometimes a marketable idea is discovered where it’s least expected. During construction at the Sundara Inn and Spa in Wisconsin Dells, Wis., the former owner, Kelli Trumble, lamented how she had sand in everything, said Tara Duarte, the director of operations at Sundara, including “every pair of shoes and boots and all over her car.”
“Yet, the sand was a pretty mix of reds and golds,” Ms. Duarte added, “and it had such an even consistency that she thought it was the sort of thing you’d find in body polishes.”
So Ms. Trumble put some sandstone into a baggie and had it analyzed at a lab. When it turned out to be sandstone of an ancient Cambrian variety, Sandstone Body Polishes soon appeared at the spa.
Designing signature services based around local ingredients sets spas apart from the competition, said Melinda Taschetta-Millane, the editor in chief of Skin Inc. magazine, a trade publication for spa professionals. “They find that if they use one of these indigenous ingredients, it helps their identity and gives their spa a distinctive mark.”
Competition is fierce with roughly 14,615 spas nationwide, up from 10,128 in 2004, according to the spa association.
As a result, spas are concocting increasingly offbeat (some might say outlandish) offerings, looking to nearby vineyards, deserts and rock formations for ingredients to slather, spritz and rub onto willing bodies.
ESSpa Kozmetika, a spa near downtown Pittsburgh, doles out hot chocolate, brownies and dark-chocolate samples in the waiting room to draw attention to its $140 Stimulating Hot Cocoa Facial and $140 Hot Chocolate Body Wrap. (What the spa doesn’t advertise is that although it gets its chocolate from a local ice cream shop, the cocoa beans are from Africa.)
Customers who choose the Rosemary and Grape Seed Foot Scrub at the spa at Auberge du Soleil in Napa Valley are greeted with a glass of 2002 Barlow merlot and tasting notes: “The balanced fruit with subtle earth and herbal notes in the merlot are wonderfully brought to life by the complementary aromatics of grape seeds and rosemary in the foot treatment.”
Spa-goers shouldn’t assume that locals have traditionally given themselves facials or wrapped their limbs in, say, a blueberry mash just because a treatment’s star ingredient is indigenous. “The Hawaiians didn’t really do a papaya scrub, although you do have papaya in Hawaii,” said Sylvia Sepielli, the owner of Sylvia Planning and Design, a spa design and consulting firm in Sedona, Ariz. In her opinion, spas that try to connect their treatments to “local healing culture” are misleading.
It is possible that discovering local ingredients at a spa will have an impact on a person’s behavior once they return home, Mr. McWilliams said.
“Maybe ‘green lite’ will turn into ‘green heavy,’ ” he said. “But the most environmentally-friendly thing we can do is reduce our consumer spending dramatically, and a spa is a dramatic luxury expense.”
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