Take a Bath: It’s Season’s Steamings

“Being good to yourself” is a fairly new concept in Western thought, but it’s managed to catch on like crazy. It used to be that people would dog-paddle through swamps full of crocodiles and water snakes because they believed such activities were part of the accepted work ethic and besides, they built character. Today we shrink from the stress of doing laundry.

“All that fooling with detergent and bleach--all that folding, “ we think. “It’s just too much. I need to be good to myself. I believe I’ll buy a new wardrobe and go to Cancun.”

Impulsively pampering oneself is officially In. No longer is it rare for someone who may well be a direct descendant of medieval flagellants to say, “Hey, gimme a break! I was being good to myself,” while the repo man is fitting a tow bar under the wheels of his Jag.

But these are lightning flashes of self-indulgence, little transitory blips on the lifetime labor graph. This sort of behavior is for people who believe in their hearts that hard work is its own reward, that “shirker” is a useful word, that there’ll be plenty of time for goofing off once we’re dead. They haven’t yet made the big existential breakthrough, the one where the white light comes blazing down and the voice says, “Take the rest of the day off!”

They haven’t yet learned that indolence takes planning .

It is for those who aspire to put some real effort into relaxing that Caswell-Massey, the largest perfumer and chemist in the country with stores in MainPlace/Santa Ana and South Coast Plaza, has come up with the high concept activity: the theme bath.

The first step in recognizing the theme bath for what it is is to forget practicality. You are not doing this to get squeaky clean. You are doing it to--repeat this-- be good to yourself. It is, says Linda McManes, Caswell-Massey’s West Coast regional manager, one form of the century-old idea of aromatherapy. It is not, she says, the alchemy some think.

“I tell people when they make a decision in the morning as to what cologne they’re going to wear, they’ve made an aromatherapy decision,” she says.

The idea that smell affects mood was articulated at length 100 years ago by a German priest named Kneipp, who wrote, according to McManes, that “nature had endowed everything with what everyone needed for a full life.” He conducted extensive botanical studies and was particularly fond of aromatherapy in concert with water therapy. This meant, in short, a perfumed bath.

“Most herbal baths are soaks,” she says, “in that it’s the fragrance that’s affecting you. It’s a mental relaxation as well as a physical one.”

Smelling good, however, is only one part of the exacting regimen of in-depth pampering. Sea salts and essential oils are added to the bath preparations, says McManes, to soften the skin.

And don’t get the idea that you get to simply turn on the tap, grab a fistful of herbs and sling them into the water. You’re not getting off that easy. Remember, serious relaxation takes work. You’ve got to start thinking of your bathtub as a big teapot.

You don’t draw a theme bath, says McManes, you steep it. That’s right, you take all the herbal ingredients, tie them up in a cheesecloth bag and toss the bag into the hot water or hang it from the spout and let the hot water run over it. It isn’t necessarily like stepping onto a pot of Earl Grey, but you get the idea.

The oils go in separately (there is one preparation called “Little Bit of Heaven” with no less than six oils in it), and there are recipes for baths that require mixing the ingredients in a blender (they include nonfat milk, almond meal, orris root powder and lavender essential oil.

Some of the ingredients are fairly exotic, and are available, says McManes, in the “Rediscovery” section of Caswell-Massey stores, but grocery and health food stores often carry the necessary items as well.

But Caswell-Massey does offer the ne plus ultra for the truly committed devotee of thoroughly planned and researched leisure time: “The Twelve Baths of Christmas.”

These are, indeed, a dozen separate bath recipes compiled specifically for the holidays and designed--if the descriptions are to be taken literally--to cut through the jacked-up stress of the season on an almost daily basis. The names say volumes: “The Pre-Shopping Energizer,” “Skin and Psyche Soother,” “Morning Motivator,” “Christmas Wrapping Bath,” and the inevitable preparation, designed for use on Dec. 26, “You Deserve a Break.”

Each costs about $5 a scoop (they mix it in the store), and each scoop is good for about two baths, McManes says.

“My theory,” she says, “is that there’s not such thing as a bad bath. What’s the worst thing that’s going to happen?”

Well, actually, you could get stressed out from worrying that you’re not pampering yourself thoroughly enough. But you really have to plan for that one. Take the rest of the day off.