Why you should pass on jumping in the shower and instead take a nice, hot soak in a tub

If you are someone who appreciates, or even revels in, the bathtub experience, if you look forward to the solitude and the solace — here’s an early warning: The tub and all the rituals associated with it are under attack.

Critics usually employ a number of fear tactics: A tub takes up too much room, they say, and uses too much water when compared with a shower. Haters insist that hotel bathtubs are germ factories and smugly point to realtors who urge home buyers to give in to the seduction of multiple shower heads and shower benches.

But super-soakers aren’t necessarily an endangered species. Architects and designers who specialize in building high-end homes and hotels insist that the tub will remain in place — in the master bathroom or extravagant suites. And if the luxury beauty market is any kind of barometer, perhaps the art of the bath won’t be relegated to movie seduction scenes anytime soon. The fierce devotion to the sourcing of ingredients used in bathing and post-bath products may inspire a new generation of bathers who will come to understand that the tub is a refuge.

These bathing products will make your soak plenty of fun and bring the spa to you at home »

“I take a lot of baths,” says Sarah Buscho, co-founder of Earth Tu Face, a San Francisco-based company whose handmade products include masks, salt scrubs and body butters that are made with ingredients such as organic lavender, organic cardamom and organic rose geranium. “It’s a stress reducer for me,” she says. “I’ll do a mask and I’ll put essential oils and minerals in the bath.”

Buscho and fellow herbalist Marina Storm launched Earth Tu Face in 2012, using a series of food-grade products “instead of the domestic grade [ingredients] the FDA deems suitable to use on your skin.” Many of the ingredients, including lavender and calendula blossoms (used in masks) come from a garden in San Rafael, where, Buscho says, a previous owner grew flowers and produce for Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse.

Rejuvenate, refresh and relax are single-word catchphrases in the luxury beauty and health business. “We live in a very rushed society,” says Milana Knowles, senior director of spa development at Paris-based Clarins. But the bath “should not be forsaken because it has relaxation benefits.”

Clarins’ extensive product line includes body lotions and creams, oils and body balms and serums and exfoliators — and the brand, not surprisingly, emphasizes ingredients and sourcing.

Knowles extols the virtues of hazelnut oil, which is used in many Clarins offerings that might be used post-bath (including its tonic line of products). It is, she says, useful in the fight against dry skin. Other ingredients used in Clarins products (and many other beauty lines) — geranium, rosemary, shea butter, coconut oil and ginseng — are described in countless beauty blogs and cosmetics packaging as having anti-inflammatory properties or being useful for aromatherapy or stimulating collagen.

When it comes to possibilities and benefits of transdermal delivery systems or aromatherapy — or even a long soak in a hot tub — many mainstream scientists just shake their heads. But the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, a federal agency tasked with investigating alternative medicine, acknowledges that certain scents may be effective in elevating mood. Prevention magazine reminds us that a warm bath can prepare the body for a good night’s sleep and (possibly) ward off a cold.

And if you’re taking the time to relax in a tub and treating yourself to a body balm infused with cashew oil (an ingredient in the Clarins Renew Plus Body Serum), it’s hard to imagine that the rest of your day (or night) is going to do anything but improve.

The bathtub has a few more uses other than as a cleansing of body and soul. It is, for some of us, associated with romance (please recall that Julia Roberts did not flash her high-wattage smile from a shower in the 1990 hit “Pretty Woman”).

For others, the bathtub speaks to prestige. Architect Don Jacobs, chairman of JZMK Partners in Costa Mesa, has designed more than 100 custom homes and says the bathtub is firmly ensconced in the minds of those who purchase high-end homes. He says luxurious homes are “always going to have a tub in the master bath. ... It’s status.”

Sometimes the tub is about fun. The U.K.-based brand Lush Fresh Handmade Cosmetics made waves in 1989 when it introduced the first of its “bath bombs,” baseball-size spheres inspired by the so-called Alka Seltzer effect. It’s estimated that the fragrances and colors and bubbles that are emitted when a bomb is dropped into the tub helped propel global brand sales for the company to more than $850 million in 2015.

And that is a whole lot of fizzy fun.

Review: Pursoma’s Resurrection Bath brings on deep relaxation and the Zzzs

Shannon Vaughn, a former model and the founder of the New York-based Pursoma beauty/wellness line, wants us to know a few things before we start to soak:

— Many of the Pursoma products are designed with the bathtub in mind, including bags of ingredients that users add to their bathwater. The goal? To cleanse and detox.

— Vaughn sources everything herself.

— She believes Pursoma products are “disconnecting treatments.”

So what’s it like to immerse yourself, say, in a one-day cleanse called the Pursoma Resurrection Bath? For starters, it’s instructive to read the small type on the product bag, which starts with, “This bath is no joke,” and continues with a list of instructions and ingredients: Ecocert French green clay, hand-harvested French grey sea salt, laminaria digitata (wild-harvested seaweed) and spirulina platensis (sustainably farmed spirulina extract). According to the Pursoma literature, the ingredients are used to stimulate circulation and restore hydration, among other desirable achievements.

I soak for about 20 minutes. It’s pleasant enough, but there is no reconnecting with my “innate, inner beauty,” which is part of the Pursoma manifesto. Nor am I greeting my imperfections “with a wink and a smile.” But I don’t want to abandon the process either, so I stay and lose track of time. It’s nice, and eventually, it’s impossible to summon a cogent thought.

When it’s time to exit the tub, the process is surprisingly difficult. But it’s late. Surely, that must be the reason I stagger into the bedroom. Wrapping myself in a blanket, I briefly ponder some of my dietary habits (Should I stop snacking on vodka and Cool Ranch Doritos? Why can’t I tell anyone that I hide my candy supply from family members?) and then lapse into unconsciousness.

At 7 a.m. the next day, I do not want to get out of bed, but it’s not a feeling that you might associate with illness or a tortured night’s sleep. It’s more like this: I’m comfortably, happily exhausted, a feeling reminiscent of the calm that follows an intense workout.

The Doritos remain unopened through the day.

image@latimes.com

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