Healing crystals shine at this spa

Crystals are incredibly popular nowadays, especially in feng shui charms and jewelry meant to bless the wearer with everything from luck to love, prosperity to health.

A new spa in town is ingeniously harnessing the healing powers of crystals in, not only its signature treatment, but also the design of its rooms.

Toccare, which means “touch” in Italian, features beautifully appointed rooms decked out in crystals, and they’re supposed to work just like your lucky charms: the Citrine Room will energize and invigorate you, the Amethyst Room promotes tranquility and busts stress, the Turquoise Room facilitates mental relaxation and emotional balance, and those are just three of the nine crystal healing rooms you can choose to benefit from.

Toccare Spa is located in Antel Spa Hotel Suites, a Makati hotel that used to cater mainly to tourists. To design and run the hotel’s piece de resistance, Antel vice president Jen Wong called in spa experts Leah Dy and Liza del Rosario of Elohim Spa Solutions, Inc., and the resulting concept has already started to draw in a more local clientele.

My family and I were invited to try a number of the spa’s signature treatments in the Rose Quartz couple’s room, which is supposed to increase the love and romance between you and your partner.

At many spas you normally get to select what oil is used for your massage, but Toccare goes a couple of steps further. Not only do you pick your massage oil, you can also choose a room scent and what kind of music gets piped into your room!

After selecting meditative tunes over classical and pop, we sampled some of Toccare’s diverse range of services, which includes waxing, nail services, ear candling and even spa cuisine.

You can do a steam, sauna or Jacuzzi in the spa’s brand-new facilities, but we opted to get to the good stuff as quickly as possible.

First for me was the Chocolate Raspberry Truffle, a luscious treatment that begins with an exfoliating body scrub that’s fairly smooth and not as scratchy as some of the scrubs I’ve had. They then wrap you up in a rich Coco Crème Soufflé, a softening, nourishing and moisturizing concoction that smells so good you’ll want to eat yourself. This is followed by a chocolate bath, where I discovered the wrap also gave me some much-needed color — a healthy tanned, rosy glow. Must be some self-tanner in there.

Next was Toccare’s signature treatment, the Healing Gem Stone massage, where they place those much-vaunted crystals on strategic body points and use heated stones to coax your pains away. The Healing Gem Stone massage was mixed in with another Toccare specialty, the Healing Bamboo massage. Don’t worry, they don’t prod you with the business end of a bamboo stick; instead they hold it like a greased rolling pin and glide it over your sore muscles. If you dislike fingers on pressure points and prefer long, flowing strokes a la Swedish massage, the Healing Bamboo is for you.

For my husband, Scott, the treatment started with a Lemongrass Sage Salt Body Scrub (60 to 90 minutes). Granules are gently massaged into the tired skin in a wet solution, which is very relaxing and exhilarating. You feel a certain lightness, losing all that dead skin, plus the smell is … appetizing. (He couldn’t help thinking of chicken and lemongrass dishes, and slow basting.)

This was followed, after a quick washdown, by the Cucumber Mint Body Wrap (90 minutes). This took some getting used to: he was gently patted down with the cold, wet preparation that was “purifying and hydrating,” while it “tones and tightens the body contours.” After being painted with cucumber mint gel all over his body, Scott was wrapped — fairly securely — in several layers of plastic. There he lay for about 20 relaxing minutes, though he said it was harder to get used to the sensation of being wrapped in wet gel. At the end, he slid off the table and showered down again.

Part 3 was the Harmony Paraffin hand and foot treatment. This can go as long as 120 minutes. It’s a soothing, languorous experience, broken into sections: a cloth is placed on the back (you lie facedown) and what feel like warm stones or candles are placed on the back. Since it’s an air-conditioned room, this is a welcome sensation. Then the therapist gradually works up and down both sides of the body with a gel that does feel like melted paraffin on the skin — not so hot as to be unpleasant, though momentarily surprising. Once the warmth is absorbed into the body, the therapist kneads and smoothes the paraffin up and down the arms, legs, hands and feet. She gently works the extremities, massaging the fingers, toes, while adding additional layers of warm paraffin. By the end, you feel quite adjusted to the paraffin layer, and have a better sense of what a candle must feel like.

Unlike most other spas, Toccare welcomes the whole family, meaning even small children can have their own spa day while mommy and daddy unwind in the couples room.

They took special care of our daughter Isobel in the hand-and-foot care room, which has seven stations outfitted with plush pillows and a flat-screen TV. While eating spa snacks and watching kiddy cable channels, children can partake of such treatments as the Flat Stone massage, green tea foot spa, foot and hand massage or even a full-fledged manicure and pedicure.

When we rejoined her Isobel was elated, saying, “I had a lot of treatments” and insisting she didn’t get bored at all. “I miss the spa life,” she sighed the next day as she prepared for school.

I second that emotion.

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Toccare Spa is on the fourth floor of Antel Spa Hotel Suites, Antel Lifestyle City, Makati Avenue, Makati. They’re open from 12 noon to midnight. For more information or to book an appointment, call 403-0808 local 2050.