The Hair Spa

By Changmoh • Wednesday, 13 November 2013 • Beauty, Health & Fitness

I love being able to try out new treatments and products. I bleach the bejesus out of my hair so anything I’m offered in the way of restorative hair treatments usually seduces me over the myriad of beauty products I am sent by PRs. Of course, the unspoken expectation is that if I even half-rate it, it’ll appear on Changmoh. Well dear reader, I value you a little bit more than that…it only gets on here if it’s good and worth writing about. Whilst I really try not to accept offers without a little bit of research – some light Googling may be more accurate – I will not feature things on this blog just because I was given them. Where’s the credibility in that?

A cream bath may sound like something you might do for Comic Relief, i.e. get into a bath full of cream, but if you live somewhere like Indonesia, the words ‘cream bath’ conjure up images of a relaxing, nurturing haircare treatment that people do almost as regularly as, say, a pedicure. Singapore can now complete, although not in terms of the volume of salons offering this treatment (the number’s not a fraction of what’s on offer in Jakarta, for instance) but Creme The Hair Spa is making a brave business venture out of the concept and they really deserve to do well.

I popped in a few weeks ago to sample their two intensive treatments and left with amazing smelling and, more importantly, feeling hair, imbued with life and bounce…and it lasted me a working week. Yup, it was FIVE whole days before I next needed to wash my hair (verging on gross, I know, but why wash it if it doesn’t need it?).

I am not particularly loyal to any particular make of shampoo and tend to use ones I’m sent or have legitimately snaffled from hotels I’ve stayed in (current fave is L’Occitane’s 5 essential oils shampoo which is tinglingly good; I love it) but my in-depth scalp consultation with these guys has made me think twice about what I slather on to my hair or, more to the point, the skin on my head. It’s really no different from the skin on your face.

The whole process took a delicious and very spoiling 2 hours. I had the scalp and the hair treatment – you can choose from one or the other or both. It started with a quick scan of my scalp which looked disgusting and rather sparsely populated on the computer screen (it’s not in real life, but there’s nothing like a close up to make you question that). From here they concoct your treatment based on your apparent problems: hair loss/grease monkey/dry as a bone etc.

You sit in your own relaxing pod in a huge, comfy chair with a massaging foot stool while your therapist gets started. I had a detox treatment for my scalp that she massaged in followed by a neck and shoulder massage using the in-house blend of French lavender massage oil. So far so good; I felt like a cow whose meat was going to be sold as kobe beef.

My hair was then swiftly shampooed before the scalp tonic was applied, packed with vitamins to help with blood circulation and promote hair growth.

I went on to have the strengthening serum and the hair mask which had also been blended in-house. I absolutely loved that all products were natural and either made by the salon or from France or Italy. There was nothing harsh and nothing with Japanese writing on that I couldn’t read (I am sure Japanese beauty products are fine, but if I can’t read the ingredients on the back of the bottle it makes me nervous).

I’ve had hair treatments in England before and while great, they often involve you leaving the salon looking like a bedraggled mess after a rough blow dry. These guys have more initiative than that. Although they just specialise in the treatment side of things, they’ve done a deal with the next door salon and I had an expert blow dry in about 15 minutes flat (my hair is short) done by two stylists.

The scalp tonic was my favorite part of the whole process, it felt minty fresh even after blowing and my hair felt fabulous – I mean lusciously fabulous and really healthy – for days afterwards…until I washed it again with a new bottle of what was probably scalp-stripping shampoo I got free from my latest hotel stay.

My treatment was courtesy of Creme The Hair Spa. I had my treatment five days before I coloured my hair. The treatment does not create a barrier that will affect colour absorption (I was worried about that part). It’s advisable to do it prior to colouring as it will go some way in helping to protect the hair.

The products used on me were predominantly from the Medavita range and included their pre-shampoo scalp treatment, the Velour shampoo and their anti-hairless treatment.