Enter the hotel's low-lit underground spa with its jet black decor, tinkling waterfalls, and golden Buddha statues, and within minutes the calming atmosphere is working its magic. But this spa, with its friendly and professional staff, offers more than just your average treatments.
You are what you eat if you take one of the spa's new offerings, currently only available at the May Fair. There are three chocolate treatments – The Chocolate Body Wrap (£99, 60 mins), The Chocolate Steam Bath for Two (£99, 45 mins) and the Chocolate Steam Bath for One (£70, 45 mins). All use pure, organic 100% cocoa to moisturise the skin.
After a sauna and aromatic steam room session to prime the skin, followed by a lie down in the darkened chill-out room, a gentle salt scrub was applied to exfoliate my skin, and washed off. Then, as if I were an oversized cup cake, I was covered from neck to ankles in melted chocolate, wrapped in a heavy heated blanket, given a spine-tingling scalp massage, and left alone to ponder bliss.
If you're of a inquisitive, usually-peckish nature, then this is the moment when you'll try the chocolate. But chocoholics beware (as the attentive Swedish therapist, Asa, intentionally explained) – pure cocoa doesn't contain fat or sugar, so although it may smell of
profiterole sauce,
hot puds, and
Green & Black's, it doesn't taste like those exquisite treats; in fact, it's bitter enough to bring tears to your eyes.
After this spa faux pas (it's not generally the done thing to taste the products), I showered off the chocolate – not an easy task, given the sticky texture of melted cocoa – then was treated to an application of Cocoa Dream Body Oil. After almost two hours of being steamed, scrubbed, smothered and showered I felt so chocolatey you could have put a coloured ribbon in my hair and placed me in a Prestat window display.
If you have someone in your life (indeed, if you are that someone in your life) that loves the sensual aroma of chocolate and the stress-relieving effects of being pampered from head to toe, then the May Fair Spa offers treatments that cannily combine the two. And with talk (as yet unconfirmed) of the chocolate experience being extended to the East River spa in the
New Providence Wharf hotel in London's Canary Wharf, and the Sienna Spa in the
Radisson Edwardian hotel in Manchester – while the May Fair will soon be starting yogurt and
crème fraîche treatments – you'll be able to sample more of these foodiephile delights.