Bring The Hammam To You With True Blue Spa’s Morocco Collection

July 14, 2009 by Storey
Filed under Product Reviews

When I was studying in France, I went with a group of friends to Morocco during one of our school breaks. This craaaazy trip left us with many stories to tell (like the men who tried to barter a trade with the guys in our group, the girls in exchange for camels or the cab drive across the desert where the cab driver threatened to leave us in the desert if we didn’t pay him more money – we won that argument btw). It was hard to relax there with the constant badgering of the street vendors and multiple near death experiences in cabs, but we did have two really great trips that stood out for me: the afternoon at the cafe, smoking mint shisha from a giant hookah (that’s tobacco) and our trip to the Hammam (the spa).

We’d been backpacking around the country for a week, making our way from Casablanca down to Marrakesh and hadn’t had the opportunity to bathe as regularly as we’d hoped. Tired of being filthy and just plain tired, we snuck into the Club Med to visit their Hammam. You’d think that a spa in the Club Med would be pretty swanky, but this place was more like a humid turkish bath in the basement than a relaxing spa. Our treatments started with the grommage – a full body scrub. The girls all went into a big shower like room and were scrubbed down with a scented scrub by a Moroccan woman with exfoliating hand mitts and no mercy. She then splashed us with buckets of cold water to rinse us off. The experience was rather invigorating (if not just a little bit painful) and did the trick of getting us super, duper clean. Follow that up with a massage of scented oils and we were feeling pretty good by the time we left.

As wild and hectic as Morocco was, it was pretty magnificent. The colors and scents and spices everywhere were truly amazing. Everywhere we went we were offered small steaming glasses of sweet mint tea and the chicken tajine with prunes quickly became my go to dish when it was offered on the menu. The medinas – winding, maze-like marketplaces – offered all sorts of crafts and spices (and knockoff soccer jerseys…) and were filled with the scent of cooking food. If you want to experience Morocco, I recommend going through a tour group rather than winging it on your own, if you want to have a more relaxing vacation. Or, of course, you can check out the new Morocco Collection from True Blue Spa.

Inspired by the scents of Morocco, this collection of bath and body products has some yummy exotic offerings. 2 of my favorite are the Moroccan Tea & Cucumber Shower Gel and the Honey & Date Body Yoghurt. The Shower Gel is reminescent of all those cups of sweet mint tea that we drank. Not your weak peppermint cup, but more like an espresso shot of mint, scalding hot in a tiny glass. The shower gel captures the earthy mint scent, but tempers the heat with a little bit of cool cucumber. For those of you who love the refreshing scent of cucumber and melon, you should check out this new twist. The gel has a great lather and rinses clean. The scent is very refreshing in the shower and lingers slightly after you’ve rinsed off. It also contains shea butter, which helped keep my skin from feeling dried out after showering.

The Honey & Date Body Yoghurt is a light weight body cream that comes in a screw top jar. The scent is an amazing, sweet almond, honey and spices scent (I didn’t really detect date at all). Yogurt is a great moisturizer (ever try it plain on your face as a mask?), as is sweet almond oil. Honey is a humectant, drawing moisture to the skin and the moisturizer also contains shea butter. While rich in moisturizing ingredients, the lotion is fairly light weight and absorbs quickly with no greasy residue. The scent is exotic, but subtle and lasts for a while. I’ve been using it at night, hoping that it’ll help me dream of exotic locales as I drift off to sleep.

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