“There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them,” Sylvia Plath wrote in The Bell Jar. Decades later, in parts of the world where water flows freely, her words still resonate. This is the time of year we sit on our bathtub’s ledge, reach for our faucets, settle the knobs at a temperature just below piping, and plug the drain. Whatever has coaxed us to the bath—a chill down the spine, a tickle in the throat, a muscular ache—the water, and what we add to it, is the secret to recovery.
The healing powers of a bath are rooted in the mere ritual of drawing one and the warmth of the water, both of which are near infallible solutions for “stress, muscle relaxation, and improving joint stiffness,” says the medical director of the Atlanta Center for Holistic and Integrative Medicine, Tasneem Bhatia, M.D. From there, specific goals can be tailored to suit your needs, with beauty brands mixing up soaks that offer everything from a relaxing digital detox to a submersion de-bloating experience.
The key to the cure-all is choosing the right ingredients. For this, we asked Bhatia and Manhattan dermatologist Gervaise Gerstner to guide us through bath time’s most potent elixirs.
The post A Winter Bath for Every Ailment: The Soaks That Cure Colds, Sore Muscles, and Beyond appeared first on Vogue.
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