Talise Ottoman Spa, Jumeirah Zabeel Saray, Dubai
Verily Dubai is the spa capital of the world. Some savvy tour operator could do seriously well offering trips to this extraordinary new global 'hub', offering a different spa 'experience' every day - for a long weekend, a week - heck, you could stay a month and not run out of spas to visit. Top of our must-revisit list, though, would be the super-luxe Talise Spa at the Zabeel Saray hotel (run by the swanky Jumeirah Group) on The Palm, which is the entirely man-made island jutting out from the centre of town. (Tip: when staying in Dubai, we find it helps to think of the place as akin to Sydney or LA: a world city, with a fab beach. Otherwise it can feel a little weird, looking up from a sunlounger, and realising you're staring at skyscrapers.)
The lovely Dr. Lamees Hamdam organised our visit to the Talise Spa for a 'Velvet Nights' experience featuring her Shiffa range of bodycare. Shiffa is ultra-natural, gorgeously-textured and - not surprisingly - turns out to be the No. 1-selling skincare range in the Sephora shops in its native Dubai. As you might expect from a Mid-Eastern range, roses (always popular with our readers) feature heavily, in the blends.
Velvet Nights is a 'couples' treatment (so Jo got to take her long-suffering, somewhat beauty-treatment-averse husband Craig along). Because of the need to keep men and women seriously segregated in much of the spa, there is a specific, lavishly-appointed 'Couples Spa' spa-within-a-spa on the first floor of Talise. As you'd expect, the décor is Middle East-inspired, with this particular suite featuring a double whirlpool bath, cushions for lounging, and side-by-side, seriously comfy massage beds.
This is a scrub/bath/massage treatment lasting 90 minutes, which begins with a good-and-proper exfoliation using Shiffa's award-winning Sweetness Body Polish (sugar-based, but it doesn't matter that it's sticky because Step Two is a 20-minute soak in water infused with the 1001 Roses Milk Bath (see our Beauty Bible Loves post about that here).
Final step is a good 45+ minutes of deeply relaxing, get-in-there-and-niggle-out-those-knots massage, using one of Shiffa's blended massage oils (by then Jo was too far gone to pay attention to which one, but it might well have been the Sensual oil, with lashings more roses and some exotic ylang-ylang).
If you go, do leave plenty of time to enjoy the spa's facilities. There are divine chill-out beds (you can look out through veiled windows at the Arabian sea, albeit with a few parked cars in between), the Middle East's biggest hammam steam rooms (and a smaller, private hammam and jacuzzi, pictured, on the Couples Floor), 'hot stone beds' (sculpted from rock, with the whole bed heating up), plus a phenomenal 'Snow Room': head there from your steam treatment and it literally snows on you, with knee-high virgin snow underfoot. There is possibly no more refreshing experience on the planet...!
The therapists should be mentioned in dispatches because they were truly gifted - Jo's was Nicole, and she'll be asking for her again in the event of a re-visit.
And even Mr. 'I Never Use Anything But Olive Oil On The Temple That Is My Body' wants to go back (that's saying something), so there is indeed a fighting chance. (Although Jo will want to take some time to explore the other spa delights of this Middle Eastern boom-town, for sure...)
Talise Ottoman Spa, Jumeirah Zabeel Sarah, PO Box 27722, Dubai, UAE/tel. +971-4453-0000 www.jumeirah.com - click here for more info about the spa
TIP: Allow plenty of time to drive to this Turkish-inspired hotel: it's almost on the tip of the outer 'frond' of The Palm, and takes much longer to drive than you'd think.