Gurney’s Puts “Fabulous” in Four Bottles
The sea and freshness are what Gurney’s Inn Resort & Spa has always been about. But now it’s also about body and hair products from Gurney’s Sea Water Spa and Thalasso Center. (Thalasso comes from the Greek, it means medical use of seawater as a form of therapy; there are thalasso centers all over Europe, particularly in France.)
Recently I received a package of four beautiful beauty products the spa is now offering. They call them Gurney’s Seawater Spa products—I call them Montauk Point-In-A-Bottle—they turn my shower to a misty dousing from ocean waves.
Busy getting the house ready for visitors, I didn’t try out the new goodies for a few weeks. Then, real spring weather arrived. Coming home from my first springtime 2013 jog on Ocean Road Beach, I climbed into the shower to get the beach off of my skin.
That didn’t happen. Instead, as I pumped out a handful of the Revitalizing Marine Shampoo, the ocean invaded. This is an indescribable smell, with a unique formula. First is sea fennel, which grows along English sea cliffs, and which helps the formula reinforce hair strength and make it more resilient. There’s also Vitamin E and Vitamin B-5, which are supposed to soothe all the damage I do to my hair when I blow-dry it and go out into the frizz-inducing sun and beach air. But more interesting still, it contains red algae—also known as Irish moss—and Brown Algae—aka Bladderwrack—to put the moisture back.
The glorious smell comes from Dewberry.
The products are the result of two years of intensive research and development and they are now offered to the public, as well as spa-goers, by Lola Monte, the wife of the late Nick Monte. Nick, the creator the United State’s only thalasso center, drank a shot of seawater every day, and was a firm believer in the healing powers of the sea.
Once I rinsed and my hair had that nice squeak to it to let me know it was clean and rid of all the other conditioners and sprays and gels and other guck I had been putting on it that week, I squeezed out a handful of the Seawater Spa Nourishing Marine Conditioner. Similar formula, but it went on smooth as silk (there I go alliterating again—can’t help it!). I noticed that the container said the ingredients in these products are 100% vegan and biodegradable. Also, they don’t have the junk a lot of other hair stuff does, like parabens, petrochemicals and synthetic fragrances that smell more like something you spray on the laundry bin to attack mildew than the clean-and-classy smell you want your crowning glory to send out.
Now it was time for the Toning Marine Shower Gel. There it was again—that Seawater formula redolent of natural seaside odors, along with green tea and its antioxidant powers to hydrate skin and do other good things. I have a real problem with allergies, but my skin loved this. Not one bit of itch, and it rinsed off clean and smooth.
I climbed out of the shower and, inhaling all that good stuff in the steam, applied the Firming Marine Lotion, which contains many of the other ingredients. Wow! Not a bit sticky. And my allergy-prone skin soaked it in without a complaint, but instead, my sun-battered (it’s only May, but damage from previous years adds up to flakiness and threatens to turn to alligator skin in some spots) skin smoothed out and behaved like baby’s skin. But it had a glow that was all grown-up and sexy-looking.
Now I have something to look forward to after my beautiful morning run splashing through the waves.
One last thing. I had a weekend guest coming, and as I got the guest room ready with fresh new linens and tidied up the guest bath, I took out the grab-bag array of junky-looking old bottles of shampoos and conditioners and gels—and replaced them with just these four pretty bottles in their sea-tone, minimalist containers. They transformed the shower my guests would use from a little too family-friendly, into something pristine and classy that says “Welcome!”