Book

Restorative Winter Bath

A salt and oil soak for the coldest weeks of the year.

Season Winter

Ingredients

  • 1 cup bath sea salt
  • 1 tablespoon almond oil, or 2 tablespoons whole milk
  • 3 drops sweet orange essential oil
  • 3 drops lavender essential oil
  • 1–2 drops ginger essential oil

Method

Mix all ingredients together and add to a hot bath.

Coarse sea salt in a shallow ceramic bowl, with oil poured over part of it, catching the light.

The salt gives the bath body and leaves the skin better than it found it. Sweet orange and lavender settle the nervous system and let tension out of the shoulders. Ginger warms, and is the reason this is a winter bath rather than a summer one. The oil or the milk emulsifies the essential oils so that they disperse through the water instead of floating on top of it — without one or the other you will get a film of oil against your skin.

A hot soak in the evening is one of the few genuinely restorative things available in January, and it fits the season. Chinese medicine treats winter as the time for warmth, stillness and early nights, and against that a hot bath is not an indulgence so much as good practice.

Do not use essential oils in a bath during pregnancy without asking first, and keep ginger oil away from broken skin.

Sea salt, a bottle of almond oil, dropper bottles of essential oil, dried lavender and a peeled orange laid out on a sunlit wooden table.