Lifestyle
Float therapy is all the rage. Could ‘dry floating’ really offer the same benefits?
It was all a tad dystopian. I parked on a scalding day in late winter at an outdoor lot in downtown L.A. surrounded by corporate skyscrapers, the sidewalks lined with housing encampments. There was nothing distinct about the condo-like building Quantum Wellness is in — other than two welcoming Goliathan Buddha sculptures.
I entered into the spa’s glimmering white lobby to try their “zero body dry float,” a bed filled with 400 liters of heated water intended to create a weightless experience that alleviates pressure from the spine and joints and melts away stress. The beds are designed to mimic a traditional float tank — where a person is suspended in water filled with epsom salt, oftentimes in complete darkness — but the perk of these beds is there’s no need to get wet. At Quantum, the experience is 35 minutes long and costs $60.
Jeremy Hoffmann is the founder, CEO and owner of Quantum Wellness Spa.
(Dania Maxwell / For The Times)
“We really wanted to focus on calming people’s nervous systems down,” says Jeremy Hoffmann, the founder and CEO of Quantum Wellness Spa. “As far as the dry float goes, I think there’s very few pieces of technology that offer deep rest and restoration. It was a no-brainer.”
The spa offers everything from traditional services such as massages and facials to biohacking, IV drips and energy work. Inside it feels like it was built for a future where humans live underground, seeking to reconnect with what life was once like on Earth. Neon lights make the dark, cool hallway and rooms feel like you’re aboard a spaceship. Reserved moss and mycelium grow from a room with a crystal floor where I heard members vigorously doing breathwork. In the area with cold plunging and a sauna, the walls undulate with patterns that change color, designed to evoke arctic caves and volcanic rock.
At the front desk, I was greeted by a host who accompanied me down the hall and into a glowing cerulean room. “Do you have an intention?” he asked.
“Presence,” I answered.
Hartman prepares for her float experience at Quantum Wellness in downtown L.A.
(Dania Maxwell / For The Times)
I stepped over the frame of the bed and laid down on a plastic sheet. The host handed me a blindfold and Bose noise-canceling headphones, playing the hypnotic sounds of a space drum with birds chirping in the distance.
“Are you comfortable?”
“Yes.”
Slowly, the host lowered me into the bed. I felt myself sink into the water, the warm fluid-filled plastic finding its way into all of my crevices.
“OK, time to relax,” I thought, taking a deep breath and audibly sighing out the day.
Almost immediately, much like in my morning meditation practice, I began to notice my frenetic, future-oriented thinking. What is the rest of my day going to look like? Maybe I’ll get Sweetgreen for lunch…
But, unlike in a meditation of the same length, at some point, my mind gave up its stubborn ruminations. I continually sighed (a sign my nervous system was downregulating), and I began to zone out to the repetitive sounds of the music. Before I knew it, the bed was rising again.
The experience was notably different from my time just a week prior at WellNest. The spa, open 24/7 in Pasadena, exclusively offers dry floating ($80 for an hour session).
The experience involves wearing a blindfold and Bose noise-cancelling headphones which play soothing music.
(Dania Maxwell/For The Times)
Like Quantum, it also felt oddly futuristic. Ahead of arrival, I’d received a video that looked like a commercial for a healthcare company explaining how to find the building and check myself in. I escorted myself up a clunky metal utility elevator which opened into a warmly lit waiting room of beiges and pinks and a desk, both empty. If I had any questions, a person named Jane, my “Wellness concierge” whom I never met, texted me to let me know she was there to support me.
I let myself into the room and stepped into the bed, one foot at a time, the warm water inside the plastic sheet sloshing around and making me feel a bit wobbly. Unlike the bed at Quantum, I was not lowered down. Instead, some water filled in around me, but I didn’t feel a firmness that gave the sensation of being tightly held or suspended. In fact, it reminded me a bit of my childhood friend’s waterbed (fun, but not particularly therapeutic).
Wet or dry floating reportedly helps reduce short-term stress and anxiety.
(Dania Maxwell / For The Times)
Anthony S. Saribekyan, the founder and CEO of WellNest, says he decided to start a dry float business after discovering the wonders of traditional float tanks for his anxiety and stress. The main benefit, he says, of the dry float versus the normal float is the convenience of not having to shower before and after. Both types of floats, he says, contain 9000 pounds of epsom salt. Dry float tanks are also more ecologically friendly because the water is sealed inside the system and typically only replaced every several months to years, rather than being regularly drained and replenished.
So far, the data is limited on the efficacy of dry floating compared to wet floating. One small study found that both types of floating increase relaxation, but that wet floating is more therapeutic.
The float tank (or isolation tank) was invented in 1954 by an eccentric researcher named John C. Lilly, who believed that an experience void of sensory input (sound, light or even gravity) was the key to understanding the nature of human consciousness. Beginning in the ’70s and ’80s, research into the benefits of wet floating took off — and has continued since, with studies funded by the National Institutes of Health. Today, the strongest and most consistent finding about wet floating is that it helps reduce short-term stress and anxiety, even after one session. There’s also been studies, many of which are smaller and more preliminary, showing the benefits of floating for conditions such as insomnia, body image dissatisfaction among people with anorexia, meth dependence and pain intensity, such as the stress placed on the body after a high-impact workout.
Emily Choquette, director of the Torrance-based Float Clinic and Research Center, says she hypothesizes that some, but not all, of the benefits received during wet floating would be achieved with dry floating, too. In studies at the Float Clinic and Research Center, Choquette says they use a zero-gravity chair — which is different from a dry float, but similar in that it creates a suspended feeling without a person being immersed in water. They’ve found the chair to be effective for many of the same conditions as wet floating, but, generally, it doesn’t seem to have as noticeable of an improvement on affect.
At least when it comes to wet floating, Choquette says, there’s enough research now that she’d like to see insurance companies cover it as an adjunct treatment for anxiety, in conjunction with therapy. As for everyone else, she sees it as a beneficial tool for a person’s wellness routine, much like yoga or meditation, something to help us reset amid the “constant bombardment of external feedback.”
As I emerged from the cavernous womb of Quantum and back out into the sprawling urban development, I had to admit: I did feel lighter, like my stress had been dialed down a few notches. Unlike before, when I had been rushing to my appointment, I walked a bit more slowly, cherishing the sun as it grazed my skin. Was it better than the reset I get after a massage in the San Gabriel Valley or a hike in the Angeles National Forest? It’s hard to say after one session, but it seems worth another visit.
Hartman tried two different locations for a dry float experience: one at WellNest and one at Quantum Wellness Spa, where she is pictured.
(Dania Maxwell / For The Times)
An illustration of the Boston Tea Party, when colonists dumped British East India Company tea into the harbor on Dec. 16, 1773. Some accounts say this marked a pivotal moment when Americans started loving coffee. But one historian says Americans were drinking lots of coffee before then.
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A consequential act of defiance secured tea’s place as perhaps the most iconic beverage of America’s colonial era.
The Boston Tea Party became an essential ingredient in the recipe for revolution in the following years.
But tea wasn’t the only hot beverage with a prominent role in America’s fight for independence.
Coffee was an important part of American culture from the start. And coffeehouses were essential, too — serving as hubs for brewing ideas of independence.
As the United States celebrates 250 years, here’s what to know about America’s early history of coffee.
Colonists were drinking coffee long before the United States existed
Europeans brought coffee with them when they came to America.
“The first documented example of a mortar and pestle used to grind coffee beans was on the Mayflower” in 1620, says historian Michelle Craig McDonald, the author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States.
“The fact that coffee was present so early is not surprising if you think about it,” McDonald says. “A number of those who were on the Mayflower came to North America from Amsterdam, which was a major coffee trading center in Western Europe by the 17th century.”
The first coffeehouse in the colonies opened in 1676 in Boston, a century before the U.S. declared independence, she says. Some taverns sold coffee even earlier.
The Boston Tea Party probably wasn’t the dramatic turning point toward coffee that some claim
On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, disgruntled colonists boarded three ships moored in Boston Harbor and threw overboard more than 92,000 pounds of tea owned by the British East India Company.
Tensions had been building between the Crown and the colonies over the previous decade, as Britain tried to levy taxes on its colonies to recoup war debts.
The Boston Tea Party protest was targeted at the British government’s passing of the Tea Act in 1773, which granted the East India Company a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. While the British had removed some unpopular taxes in the preceding years, they left tea taxes in place. Colonial merchants were especially upset that the act allowed the East India Company to undercut their tea business.
To build solidarity for their cause of sovereignty, some patriots called on colonialists to swear off tea in favor of coffee. It’s why many histories point to the Boston Tea Party as a turning point when Americans switched from mostly drinking tea to mostly coffee. The anti-tea sentiment was immortalized in a founding father’s now-famous letter.
In July 1774, John Adams (before he became the second U.S. president) wrote to his wife Abigail, recounting an incident during his travels. After a long day, he asked the proprietor of the house where he was lodging for a cup of tea, provided it was smuggled and free of British taxes.
” ‘No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I’le make you Coffee.’ Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better,” Adams wrote.
Despite John Adams claiming a newfound patriotic duty to appreciate coffee, McDonald says colonists had been drinking lots of coffee all along.
She studied advertisements from the 1760s and ’70s to estimate how many shops sold coffee versus tea. Even before the Boston Tea Party, she says, “coffee is definitely more broadly available than tea is.”
A big reason? It was cheaper. “Its price again per pound is significantly less, which tells you about its availability, its accessibility to drinkers.”
Historians say it’s hard to definitively compare tea with coffee consumption, though, as official records from before America gained independence were inconsistent.
And smuggling was rampant, making official records even less reliable.
“There is a vast amount of smuggling,” says Joyce Chaplin, a professor of early American history at Harvard University. “So they’re not paying formal duties on tea that they get from the Dutch. They’re probably not paying formal duties on coffee from the French Caribbean.”
And Chaplin notes that people who loudly proclaimed a new appreciation for coffee over tea weren’t always doing what they said. It could have been political pandering. “I do not drink tea that comes via the East India Company,” she posits someone of the era saying. “But, you know, other sources are fine. Ditto for the coffee.”
Coffeehouses were a hub for revolutionary ideas
A coffeepot with cover, circa 1795. It has an American eagle motif, made in China for the American market. Coffee was part of a growing trend of globalization in the colonial era.
Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images
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Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images
In the colonial era, coffeehouses were hotbeds for seditious thought — where people planned acts of revolution.
“Coffeehouses are kind of famous for being places where people think and plot things,” says Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.
A coffeehouse called the Green Dragon served as one of the locations for planning the Boston Tea Party. Years earlier, the Old London Coffeehouse in Philadelphia was a meeting place for strategizing responses to another British tax, the Stamp Act of 1765.
In Britain, coffeehouses were nicknamed “penny universities,” Pendergrast says: “because for a penny you could go and learn a whole lot by sitting around in a coffeehouse and discussing everything.” The same attitude traveled across the Atlantic.
Early American coffeehouses would commonly have city business directories, libraries of newspapers and currency exchange information. People could get maritime insurance there or buy things at auction.
“There’s a reason why coffeehouses become places of colonial protest … in the 1760s, in the 1770s, and it’s because it is the place where traders and merchants tended to gather,” historian McDonald says. “That’s where they heard about the economics of the day.”
Taverns were more likely than coffeehouses to have rooms for rent and stables for travelers’ horses. They were also more likely to have food.
Interestingly enough, coffeehouses could serve alcohol and taverns could serve coffee.
But the vibes at each were different. While women and men could “riotously drink together” in taverns, coffeehouses often didn’t allow women, according to Chaplin of Harvard.
“The sense was the coffeehouse was the place where you had a clear head — to argue about politics, to find out what was going on in the business world, to cut a business deal,” she says. “Whereas taverns were places where, in a sense, you refueled.”
Still, she says, the lines between the two “weren’t completely clear.”
The cost of America’s revolutionary drink
Coffee (and tea for that matter) was part of a growing globalization of trade around this time.
Much of the coffee in the colonies was grown in the Caribbean, while tea came from China.
Supply was up and coffee was easier than ever to drink. “Trade and frankly, imperialism, are making it possible for … colonial products to be produced and transferred to other parts of the world in greater and greater quantities,” says Chaplin.
As a result, by the time of the American Revolution, both coffee and tea were in reach for many common people. “They’re both becoming affordable luxuries,” Chaplin says.
Fancy coffee and tea paraphernalia were also part of this increasingly global market. Middle and upper-class people would have wanted special implements for drinking these beverages and a place to drink it. That meant they needed wood for coffee tables, silver for coffeepots, and porcelain for teapots.
“These two beverages are encouraging people to consume all kinds of new stuff,” says Chaplin. “The mahogany that comes out of the Caribbean, the china coming out of China, silver that is mined principally in South and Central America and processed in a lot of the parts of the world.”
There’s a dark side to coffee’s history, too. The plantations that supplied the crop ran on the labor of enslaved people. By 1790, half of the world’s coffee was being grown in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in what is today Haiti, Pendergrast says, where slaves were routinely mistreated, raped and murdered.
The Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, is infamous for a contradiction. It proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” but failed to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people living in America at the time.
Coffee carried a similar contradiction. The beverage that fueled conversations that inspired America’s fight for independence — centered on the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — depended on enslavement.
“Coffee had this paradoxical effect, that it did promote revolutionary thought,” Pendergrast says. “But it was also grown by slaves.”
Just in time for a contentious 250th anniversary of the United States of America, historian David S. Reynolds’ latest book, Two Ships, helps us realize that any country that couldn’t agree on its own origin story is destined for divisive times.
Two Ships is about the complicated, conjoined legacy of the landings of the Mayflower, which carried the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Mass., in 1620, and the White Lion, which arrived in Jamestown a year earlier, bringing the first enslaved Africans to Virginia.
As Reynolds demonstrates, it’s not so much the facts of these two voyages, as it is the meanings ascribed to them, that made them such a powerful metaphor for two conflicting visions of American identity.
To simplify, the Mayflower’s passengers were separatist Puritans, dissenters to the reign of the English king, James I. As the United States developed, the Mayflower was credited with carrying the seeds of a radical democracy to the New World, one in which all men (in theory, at least) were equal before God.
In contrast, the European settlers of Jamestown were Royalists, also known as Cavaliers. Loyal to the monarchy, they believed in a strict hierarchy.
But the meaning of the images of the two ships shifted depended on who was invoking them and when. Not surprisingly, the metaphor was deployed most vigorously during the Civil War. In abolitionist speeches and writings, the White Lion or the “Slave-Ship,” as it was commonly called, was condemned for infecting America with the “plague-spot” of slavery.
Reynolds says that Frederick Douglass resorted to the “two ships” metaphor frequently, while Lincoln avoided it, hoping to preserve a unified ship of state. Meanwhile, Southern descendants of Cavaliers invoked the Mayflower to emphasize the intolerance and “cruel, persecuting” character of the Puritans. In a comment that resonates for our own times, Reynolds says:
It didn’t matter to the South that … by the mid-nineteenth century, the North had become a kaleidoscope of religious denominations, …, few of which resembled the faith of the Plymouth colonists. Distortion is intrinsic to cultural memory, especially when amplified by sectional or political bias. For Southerners, the Mayflower had brought Puritanism, which had yielded fanatical movements like abolitionism, now a dire threat to the Union.
In a brief-but-fascinating digression into the unpredictable power of literary fiction, Reynolds observes that the South’s fondness for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s anti-Puritan novel, The Scarlet Letter, and, even more, for the medieval historical romances of Sir Walter Scott, bolstered its nostalgia for a largely-imagined feudal society.
Reynolds quotes the always-quotable Mark Twain, no fan of Scott’s, as saying that Scott “did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote …”
Two Ships is a dazzling survey of some three centuries of American history through a close reading of a metaphor. By the 1890s, Reynolds says, the interpretive tide had turned again: “Southern and Northern whites, feeling threatened by people of color and by an array of European immigrants, were retreating to a cocoon of racial solidarity that Mayflower celebrations helped reinforce.”
By the later-20th century, the image of the Mayflower was depoliticized and commercialized into Pilgrim hats and Black Friday sales. The powerful metaphor of the two ships receded into the mist.
Seven years ago, however, the 1619 Project piloted the White Lion — “The Slave-Ship” — back into view and anchored it at the center of debates about slavery’s place in the national story. The 1619 Project has been faulted for its historiography, and it does lie outside of the chronological boundaries of Reynolds’ book; still, it seems too momentous a reappearance of the White Lion not to at least acknowledge in this book.
That criticism noted, I think reading Two Ships would be an excellent way to observe this particular Fourth of July. It’s wise for all of us to have a more informed awareness of how Americans have understood, misunderstood and, often, flattened each other into stereotypes. Or, as Ernest Hemingway, one of the Mayflower Pilgrims’ more cynical descendants, might say in response to that sentiment: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
I took a kid’s camera to Paris Fashion Week, because was it ever really that serious? Yes and no. This men’s season happened during one of the hottest weeks in France’s recorded history, which inspired that specific brand of collective hysteria brought on by living through yet another unprecedented moment together — taking over our brains and ruining our plans to wear boots — and a grander reflection on what we were doing there and why. The throngs of teenagers doing back flips into the Canal Saint-Martin and playing soccer in the street set the mood for the week. If the world is ending, you might as well swim in dirty water and have fun doing it, no?
As far as the shows went, there was the coastal stoner energy of Tokyo-based Auralee — brightly colored leathers and furry flip-flops — that reminded me of the low-key elegance of hanging out in Southern California. At the Rick Owens show, Rick-heads made minimal weather-restrictive tweaks to their usual uniforms — platforms, leather, ground-grazing garments — making you appreciate the beauty in that level of ascetic dedication. Louis Vuitton built a literal beach as its runway, complete with sand and a giant wave that felt like a mirage: Is this a heat-induced hallucination or yet another buzzed-about set design under men’s creative director Pharrell Williams? At the Dries Van Noten show, there was an ice-cold beer fridge and popsicles, a chic and inspired detail only rivaled by a collection that was a breath of fresh air during a week where I Googled the symptoms of heat stroke more than once. The Willy Chavarria show was air-conditioned, pumped with Xinú perfume and felt expensive. Sven Marquardt, a Berlin photographer and Berghain’s most famous bouncer, was sitting in front of me, which I took as an incredibly good omen. The painted blue feet and Oakley collab sunglasses at the Kiko Kostadinov show felt auspicious as well.
A look from the Auralee show.
There were conversations floating around about how apocalyptic it felt sitting at a fashion show in over 100-degree Fahrenheit weather, our backs soaked, our minds dizzied, when the industry is responsible for something like 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The cognitive dissonance contributed to the thickness in the air that week.
At the Comme des Garçons show, called “If the War Were to End..,” models danced and ran and skipped out onto the runway for the finale, soundtracked by the joyous sound of children singing “You’re So Good to Me” by the Langley Schools Music Project. In that moment, we were happy, we were clapping, we might have even been hopeful. Humans have the capacity to hold a lot — a fan in one hand while attempting not to completely melt in the front row, and a fantasy that there might still be a future where we get to wear those leopard-print Dries shoes we fell in love with on the runway.
The moments before the Comme des Garçons show.
Comme des Garçons show attendees.
Comme des Garçons, head-to-toe.
The Comme des Garçons show.
The Dries Van Noten show.
A chic and inspired detail at the Dries Van Noten show: ice-cold beer.
Scenes from the ERL presentation.
The Kiko Kostadinov show.
Tapping in from Louis Vuitton beach.
Quavo at the Louis Vuitton show.
Scenes from after the Louis Vuitton show.
Scenes from the Louis Vuitton show.
Scenes from the Nahmias x Puma dinner at Gigi Paris.
Scenes from the On X Online Ceramics rave.
At Silencio to see Venezuelan DJ and producer Safety Trance.
The Willy Chavarria show.
Scenes from Willy Chavarria.
The throngs of teenagers doing back flips into the Canal Saint-Martin and playing soccer in the street set the mood for the week.
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