Seaweed baths are a health and beauty phenomenon in Ireland and are meant to do wonders for your hair. Photo / Derek Cheng
Seaweed baths are a health and beauty phenomenon in Ireland and are meant to do wonders for your hair. Photo / Derek Cheng
Derek Cheng travels to Ireland and finds an unlikely candidate amid the country’s plethora of top tourist attractions.
Many things spring to mind when you think about the best way to take a bath. Towers of glistening bubbles to the heavens. A glass of champagne and a personal harem of masseuses and supermodels.
But a pile of seaweed?
In Ireland, slipping into this slimy mess has been a tradition for 300 years, while seaweed has been part of the diet on the west coast of Ireland for millennia.
It was supposedly a favourite of Queen Maeve’s, the warrior legend who may or may not have existed some 2000 years ago and, so our group of travelling journalists were told, had to sleep with 30 men per day to satiate her seaweed-fuelled libido.
It was also a staple part of the Irish diet in the 19th century during the potato famine - whether this triggered an insatiable sexual appetite in the general population is unclear - and became a regular among coastal workers in the early 20th century, who finished their day with an Irish stout and a bowl of dried dillisk.
These days it’s the prized centrepiece of the ever-burgeoning health and wellness industry; 77,000 tonnes of seaweed was exported from Ireland in 2018, according to a report from the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, while the west coast is dotted with a plethora of wellness spas offering all manner of seaweed-based treatments.
Nourished in Nature guide Lucianne Hare shows off the "lion's tail" seaweed on the beaches of western Ireland. Photo / Derek Cheng
It’s meant to do wonders for your skin, hair, and body and mind in general. Anxious or depressed? A touch of irritable bowel syndrome? A family history of Parkinson’s, arthritis or rheumatism? Nothing a dose of seaweed can’t silver-bullet.
Then there’s the fertilising powers if you add it to soil, or the nutritional boost if you mix it with butter or sprinkle it on your vegetables.
Within moments of walking onto the pebbly beach at Strandhill, County Sligo, my eyes seized upon a golden-brown stalk with a lily pad tail. “Lion’s tail,” our seaweed foraging guide Lucianne Hare declared, which she said is full of iron and potassium. Wash then boil for 30 minutes and you’ll find a potato-like taste, a very apt substitute during, for instance, a potato shortage.
“It’s high in vitamins and minerals to make your hair glow, and also iodine, which your thyroid needs,” she added of seaweed in general. It’s also free, if collected from whatever’s washed up on the beach. Just give the tail a minimalist haircut and leave the rest so it can grow back.
No wonder it’s such an economically enriching industry. What better business model than a harvest of freebies and a target market of the health and beauty-obsessed, who tend to have fat wallets, or at least use much of their wallets’ fatness to buy things to enrich health and beauty.
Voya co-founder Neil Walton points to the oozing goodness of seaweed that is now a popular health and beauty product - and bathing accompaniment. Photo / Derek Cheng
And there’s no questioning the health benefits of a seaweed bath, according to Voya Seaweed Baths co-founder Neil Walton.
”This is science. It’s not tree-hugger stuff,” he said as he plopped a massive dollop of bladderwrack seaweed into a bucket of hot seawater. After a few moments, he lifted an armful to show us the gelatinous gluey goodness oozing from its long leafy limbs.
A former triathlete and long-distance runner, Walton opened Voya in part to unleash the benefits of seaweed bathing for sports recovery. But he wasn’t happy with the anecdotal, telling us he volunteered for science experiments to see if the research could back up the good vibes.
The results, he said, were that seaweed bathing boosts the body’s uptake of iodine and minerals, while increasing its capacity to absorb the lactose that builds up in your muscles when they’re worked.
It’s not easy to find evidence of this online in any academic paper (Walton did not respond to a request for direction).
A paper co-written by Peter Smyth from the University College Dublin - the scientist Walton cited - showed there was good iodine uptake from breathing the air at a seaweed-enriched beach, compared with “low seaweed-abundant coastal and inland areas respectively”. This doesn’t sound like much of a revelation, akin to saying you’ll have more of a tan the closer you are to the sun.
Another paper of Smyth’s was hardly a resounding seaweed endorsement; it noted “universal salt iodisation remains the optimum method”, while cautioning against eating too much kelp “as even small amounts can have antithyroid actions”.
It wasn’t until later that evening that the curious among us were able to soak in a sample.
Seaweed baths are meant to do wonders for your skin, including under your armpits. Photo / Derek Cheng
The Ice House Hotel, in the small town of Ballina, was used in the 1800s to keep fish on ice before they were shipped to Dublin. Today it’s a luxury hotel with a picturesque riverside verandah complete with a spa, sauna, steam room and bathtubs.
A seaweed bath doesn’t look particularly inviting, unless a giant tub of miso soup is your very particular thing.
Sliding down among the long limbs of the seaweed was like being wrapped in warm strands of softened, silky leather. Maybe I’d been well primed for a good experience, but I could almost sense the goodness of the ooze enveloping every pore.
Soon I was rubbing handfuls of the stuff over my chest, under my armpits, in my face and through my hair. If it’s as good as claimed, I reasoned, then it should be rubbed on every part of me as much as possible. That goes for my insides too, so I took a bite from one of the seaweed limbs. Pretty plain and bland, but not unpleasant, and think of the mineral enrichment!
When my hour was up, I eased myself out of the tub, down a few steps and into the cool waters of the Moy River. I then repeated the hot and cold treatment with the sauna and steam room, in between being dunked in cold water, courtesy of a giant bucket shower.
By the time I was ready to return to my room, a supple fluidity had overwhelmed me, along with the kind of deeply-embedded relaxation that follows a perfect massage. It was cerebral, too, as if emerging from a 10-day meditation retreat with a dreamy, lazy, bullet-proof equanimity.
And my skin was soft, too, while my hair - usually neglected from a grooming standpoint - had a shine in its step. I assumed this was also true of my armpits, though I neglected a close inspection.
It may or may not be science, but there was little doubt in my mind, body, spirit and armpits that the slime had somehow left me blissfully intoxicated.
Fly from Auckland to Dublin with one stopover with Qatar Airways, Emirates and Air NZ (with Aer Lingus). The drive time from Dublin to Strandhill, County Sligo is about two hours and 30 minutes.
