Lifestyle

Is this $130 ‘head orgasm’ in Orange County worth it? We tried it

Published

2 months ago

February 2, 2026

Is this 0 ‘head orgasm’ in Orange County worth it? We tried it

I’m getting a brain massage — and it’s sublime.

I’m lying on a heated massage bed, cocooned in a soft, weighted blanket, as Kayla Faraji caresses my cheeks with billowy, pink goose feathers. She slides them down the sides of my neck and around my bare shoulders, sending chills up my spine.

“Now I’m scratching, scratching your chest,” Faraji whispers into my ear, especially breathy. “These are golden nails.” She drags long, prickly iron nail tips up my arms and along my collarbone, filling my ears with a raspy scraping sound.

Kayla Faraji tickles reporter Deborah Vankin’s hands with pink goose feathers.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

It’s all part of an hour-long ASMR session at Faraji’s new Kas Wellness in Costa Mesa.

“It’s deeply relaxing and restorative — and there’s such a need for that right now,” Faraji says of our session. “I feel like ASMR is the future of wellness, the new massage.”

A practitioner traces a client's arm with bamboo chopsticks.

ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, is the pleasurable tingling feeling brought on by gentle auditory, visual or tactile stimuli — think the sound of cellophane wrap crinkling, oil droplets sizzling, fingernails rhythmically tapping a desktop or a hairbrush swooshing through thick, wavy locks. The feeling is sometimes called a “head orgasm” because, for those who respond to it, ASMR can not only calm the central nervous system, but may bring on a sense of euphoria, giddiness or acute alertness.

Only about 20% of the population, however, experience “the tingles,” as the sensation is often referred to. But for those who are ASMR-sensitive, studies show there are health benefits: It may temporarily alleviate stress, sleeplessness, low mood and chronic pain as well as aid focus. People who experience ASMR also show lowered heart rate and blood pressure because it activates the parasympathetic nervous system for relaxation.

Over the last decade, ASMR has exploded in popularity — the term was coined in 2010 by cybersecurity analyst Jennifer Allen and in 2025 “ASMR” was a top search term on YouTube. But until recently, the ASMR community has primarily coalesced online. ASMR enthusiasts — a.k.a. “Tingleheads” — typically have watched videos online of a practitioner whispering while combing a client’s hair, for example, or dipping rose petals into paraffin wax and, after they harden, tapping the edges on a hard surface to trigger a sense of relaxation or bliss.

Faraji, in addition to opening Kas Wellness, also posts ASMR videos on TikTok, where she has more than 300,000 followers. One of her videos — in which she chews gum while dripping warm massage oil onto the back of a client’s neck — has garnered more than 26 million views.

But ASMR‘s online dominance is changing as more and more brick-and-mortar ASMR studios pop up around the country.

“There’s been a lack of real-world opportunities for people to intentionally have their ASMR triggered by an expert,” says physiologist Craig Richard, author of 2018’s “Brain Tingles.” “It’s only starting to happen in the real world where you can go and explore it through an intentional ASMR practitioner, like you can walk in and get a massage.”

As the founder of ASMR University, which compiles and shares research findings around ASMR, Richard keeps an updated list of in-person ASMR studios internationally — and they’re still rare, he says. “As of January, there are 16 businesses that stimulate ASMR in person in the U.S., four in Canada, 11 in Europe and one in South Africa,” he says.

In addition to Kas Wellness, the L.A. area also has Soft Touch ASMR Spa in Pasadena, which caters to women and nonbinary clients. But little else.

Faraji says she conceived Kas Wellness as a full-scale “luxury ASMR boutique” with spa vibes. The space is a mash-up of textures: Rows of warm, flickering candles illuminate a cool, polished concrete floor; velvet curtains ripple by plush and furry throw rugs. There’s a candy dish in the lobby, which is awash in hues of cream and white, offering visitors gummies infused with passion fruit and the calming herb ashwagandha.

Kas Wellness offers one signature ASMR service — or “sensory journey” — for one hour, 90 minutes or 100 minutes. Clients may upgrade to a “four hand session,” in which two practitioners work on them simultaneously. As in a massage, guests undress “to the level of their comfort,” Faraji says (I did from the waist up) and slip beneath crisp white sheets on a treatment bed in a private room. Practitioners — there are four at Kas Wellness — then stimulate the head, face, chest, arms, hands and back using “tingle tools,” as they’re sometimes called, or “triggers.” One is a so-called “sparkle brush,” filled with tiny beads that rattle as the brush sweeps through hair; another is a soft “sensory brush” that provides a form of white noise when swooshing over skin; jade stone combs feel cool to the touch and give off a hollow scratching sound.

Faraji likes to use her own nails as a sensory trigger.

“The human connection is such a part of this,” she says. “We try to spend time incorporating real touch as much as possible.”

That said, the ASMR experience is distinctly different than a massage, Faraji explains.

“Fundamentally, the concept of a massage is manipulating your tissue and muscles through pressure,” she says. “ASMR is the complete opposite — we use light sensory touch to relieve stress. We’re not kneading or applying pressure or manipulating your joints. It’s surface touch. We have so many nerves in our body and they’re all firing — it takes your body out of fight or flight.”

For an additional $20, guests can don robes and enjoy the lounge area before their treatment. It features hanging macrame chairs, a tabletop mindfulness garden and refreshments such as sparkling water, hot tea and Japanese whiskey. There’s also a meditation corner, where visitors can scribble what they want to let go of in their life on pieces of water soluble paper, before dropping them into a dish of floating candles and watching their troubles dissolve. Then they’re encouraged to light a candle and meditate on positive intentions they want to bring into their lives.

A practitioner uses green jade combs on a client.

Kas Wellness also offers custom sound baths for up to eight guests at a time. Faraji leads the sound bath experience and, by request, ASMR practitioners will gently brush clients’ hair or scritch-scratch their arms while they listen to her play the singing bowls.

Kas Wellness may be rooted in ASMR, but the overall effect feels more robust: part high-end massage studio, part spa, part sound bath destination and part meditation center.

A woman in a white bathrobe lights a floating meditation candle.

“It’s about the mind-body-soul connection and ASMR is just the anchoring modality,” Faraji says of her new boutique. “It’s equally important to have the gratitude breathwork at the end [of a session] for mindfulness. Because if your mind isn’t well, your body will never feel calm.”

After my treatment, I lingered in the lounge, where everything felt especially pronounced: my bare feet on the cool cement floor, my toes sinking into the plush rug, even the scent of my hot peppermint tea. I’m not sure if I’d felt the tingles, per say, but I was relaxed for the rest of the day.

“ASMR is such a universal thing,” Faraji says. “When we’re younger, physical touch is such a big part of our creativity — girls will sit and braid each other’s hair and there was that rhyming game, where you tickle each other’s backs [like] spiders crawling up your back. But as we get older, we have less access to soft nurturing touch, especially if you’re single. I think that’s why ASMR resonates with so many people. It’s just comforting.”

Lifestyle

‘Stay Alive,’ about daily life in Nazi Berlin, shows how easy it is to just go along

Published

10 hours ago

April 3, 2026

Press Room

‘Stay Alive,’ about daily life in Nazi Berlin, shows how easy it is to just go along

It’s been 80 years since Adolf Hitler shot himself in his bunker, yet our fascination with the Nazi era seems eternal. By now I’ve read and seen so many different things that I’m always surprised when somebody offers a new angle on what the Nazis wrought.

Ian Buruma does this in Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945, a new book about living in a country where you have no control over what happens. Inspired by the experience of his Dutch father, Leo, who was forced to do factory work in Berlin, Buruma uses diaries, memoirs and some personal interviews — most of the witnesses are dead, of course — to explore how it felt to be in Berlin during World War II. He weaves together a chronicle that carries Berliners from the triumphant days when Germany steamrolled Poland and daily life felt almost “normal” (unless you were Jewish, of course) through the end of the war when bombs pulverized the city, and Soviet soldiers arrived to rape and pillage.

As he writes of air raid drills, food shortages and the incessant deluge of rumors, Buruma has to deal with the difficulty that most ordinary Germans left behind very little record. They kept their heads down and tried to stay alive. And so the book moves among more interesting characters whose multiplicity gives dimension to our usual flattened sense of Nazi Germany.

Author Says Hitler Was 'Blitzed' On Cocaine And Opiates During The War

We meet Coco Schumann, a young Jewish guitarist who risks his life to play the jazz music that Nazis considered degenerate. We meet 15-year-old Lilo, who starts off thinking that Nazi ideals make life beautiful, but comes to admire the greater nobility of those who tried to assassinate Hitler. There’s the dissident intelligence officer Helmuth von Moltke, a conservative who seeks to work from inside against the Nazis (he gets hanged for his trouble). And there’s Erich Alenfeld, a Jew who converted to Christianity and remained a German patriot: He sent a letter to Reichsminister Hermann Göring asking if he could serve.

We also encounter several of the usual suspects, most notably propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels who, when not coercing young actresses into sex, is busy generating false headlines, ordering movie spectacles to distract the masses (he loved Disney films), and monitoring the city’s morale. Always laying down edicts — like ordering Jews to wear the yellow star — he’s the Nazi who may have done most to affect Berlin’s daily life: He even keeps banning and reinstating dancing.

Russell Crowe learned German to play the part of the Nazis' second-in-command Hermann Göring in James Vanderbilt's Nuremberg.

Along the way, Stay Alive is laced with nifty details. How one family trained its parrot to say “Heil, Hitler” to fool the Nazis if they came to arrest someone. How, a crew of filmmakers kept shooting a movie with no film in the camera so they wouldn’t be drafted to fight doomed last ditch battles. How Jewish villas in the posh Grunewald area were bought up or seized by Nazi bigshots, but now belong to Russian oligarchs. And how some of those trying to elude the Nazis became known as U-boats, because they dived into the city’s murky underworld, even hiding out in brothels.

As one who’s written well for decades about historical guilt and denial, Buruma is too savvy to belabor familiar Nazi horrors. That said, he offers two dark truths that strike me as being especially apt in these days when authoritarianism is making a worldwide comeback.

The first is that you can’t live in a dirty system without somehow being corrupted. Whether you were a famous symphony conductor or a cop on the beat, Nazism tainted virtually everyone, forcing people to do and say abhorrent things they often didn’t believe in, and weakening their moral compass. As von Moltke wrote his wife: “Today, I can endure the sufferings of others with an equanimity I would have found execrable a year ago.”

He wasn’t alone. The second dark truth is how easy it is to simply go along. Most Berliners — and even Buruma’s own father — did their jobs, took their pleasures and preferred not to think about the evils under their noses. This, Buruma says, “is disturbing but should not surprise anyone. Human beings adapt, carry on, turn away from things they don’t wish to see or hear.”

If the book has a hero, it’s probably Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, a journalist who didn’t turn away. Along with her partner, the conductor Leo Borchard, she ran a resistance group named Uncle Emil, risking her life to protect Jews, help them escape, and support other groups battling the Nazis. All this makes her much braver than I’ve ever been. But I equally admire her refusal to be sanctimonious about those who, fearing prison or worse, didn’t rise up against the dictatorship. She had the rare virtue of being righteous without being self-righteous.

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Lifestyle

Stop and smell the native plants at the L.A. Times Plants booth at Festival of Books

Published

11 hours ago

April 3, 2026

Press Room

Stop and smell the native plants at the L.A. Times Plants booth at Festival of Books

Are you interested in creating a native habitat or have questions about your plants? Come meet experts from the Theodore Payne Foundation and the California Native Plant Society, along with Times staffers, at the L.A. Times Plants booth during The Times’ Festival of Books at USC on April 18 and 19.

In a new location this year — booth 554 in the Red Zone — the L.A. Times Plants booth will be a tribute to L.A. Times plants writer Jeanette Marantos, a passionate supporter of native plants, who died in February.

There will be giveaways of hundreds of 4-inch plants from Theodore Payne and The Times throughout the weekend. Also, anyone who signs up for our free monthly L.A. Times Plants newsletter will receive Jeanette’s Mix, a special packet of sunflower seeds and California poppy seeds that Marantos hoped to offer this year.

Jeanette Marantos at the L.A. Times Plants booth at Festival of Books on April 21, 2024.

(Maryanne Pittman)

We’ll also have colorful plant-inspired stickers and copies of the Weekend print section with Times garden coverage to give away.

Booth visitors will be able to smell and look at plants from the Theodore Payne Foundation and learn how native plants can not only save water but also support local wildlife such as bees, birds and monarch butterflies. Theodore Payne will also have merchandise available for purchase and other seed packets to hand out.

As part of the booth, representatives from the California Native Plant Society will show visitors how to use Calscape, an online database of native plants that allows you to customize your landscape needs based on your ZIP Code.

Stop by the L.A. Times Plants booth (booth 554 in the Red Zone) between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. on April 18 or from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on April 19. The Festival of Books is held on the USC campus. For more information, check the festival’s FAQ page.

Lifestyle

Ziggy Stardust and Hacky Sack: What life was like the last time we went to the moon

Published

22 hours ago

April 2, 2026

Press Room

Ziggy Stardust and Hacky Sack: What life was like the last time we went to the moon

David Bowie debuted his Ziggy Stardust persona and released The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars in 1972 — the last year humans went to the moon.

Evening Standard/Getty Images/Hulton Archive

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Evening Standard/Getty Images/Hulton Archive

The Artemis II rocket launched on Wednesday, carrying astronauts to the moon for the first time in over half a century.

The four-person crew is headed on a 10-day, 230,000-mile journey around the moon and back — a pivotal test of the Orion spacecraft that NASA hopes will bring future astronauts to the lunar surface as soon as 2028 and Mars after that.

The last time humans went to the moon was the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972.

Four Artemis II crew members, dressed in blue jumpsuits, pose in front of a rocket.

The final Apollo mission involved three astronauts: Command module pilot Ronald Evans orbited above as Eugene Cernan and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt — a professional geologist, in a notable first — touched down on the moon’s Taurus-Littrow valley.

The pair spent just over three days on the lunar surface, collecting some 250 pounds of moon rock and soil samples. They set multiple records, including the longest stay on the moon (75 hours), the most lunar samples collected and the longest mission duration at 12 days, 14 hours.

NASA astronaut Eugene Cernan, commander of the Apollo 17 lunar mission, is welcomed back to Earth after splashing down in the Pacific Ocean on Dec. 19, 1972.

NASA/Getty Images/Hulton Archive

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NASA/Getty Images/Hulton Archive

The crew knew they would be the last to visit the moon at least for the foreseeable future, as NASA had decided two years earlier to cancel the remaining Apollo missions, primarily due to budget cuts.

50 years ago, U.S. astronauts landed on the moon. None have been back since

Cernan became the last human to walk on the moon on Dec. 14, 1972. He acknowledged the significance of the moment out loud as he stepped off the lunar surface, seemingly nodding to Neil Armstrong’s infamous words from the 1969 moon landing.

“As we leave the moon and Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came — and God willing as we shall return: with peace, and in hope, for all mankind,” said Cernan, who died in 2023.

A lot has changed in the 53 years since. Here’s what life was like the last time astronauts launched to the moon.

A banner year for geopolitics, pop culture and technology

Richard Nixon became the first U.S. president to visit China in February 1972.

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The year 1972 is in many ways synonymous with upheaval: the uncovering of the Watergate scandal, “Bloody Sunday” in Northern Ireland, the “Munich massacre” at the 1972 Olympics, North Vietnam’s “Easter Offensive” in the final years of the Vietnam War — and antiwar protests at college campuses and political conventions.

That was the year President Nixon announced that no more draftees would be sent to Vietnam, and the year he visited China in a presidential first.

50 years ago, the Munich Olympics massacre changed how we think about terrorism

The Volkswagen Beetle officially surpassed the Ford Model T as the most popular — and most-produced — car in the world. And a gallon of regular gasoline cost 36 cents, or the equivalent of $2.53 a gallon today, according to the AARP.

Herbie, the anthropomorphic Volkswagen Beetle featured in the 1969 Disney film "The Love Bug" and its sequels, terrorizes a young woman at a car show in Berlin in June 1972. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Herbie, the anthropomorphic Volkswagen Beetle featured in the 1969 Disney film The Love Bug, terrorizes a young woman at a car show in Berlin in June 1972.

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Keystone/Getty Images/Hulton Archive

1972 was also a major year for still-beloved cultural creations. It marked the debut of David Bowie’s alter ego Ziggy Stardust, the formation of ABBA, the opening of Grease on Broadway. The top-selling album of the year was Neil Young’s Harvest, and the biggest box office hit was The Godfather, which came out in March.

Fashion was dominated by bold colors and patterns, bell-bottoms, shawls, platform shoes and synthetic fabrics, as part of “the Polyester Decade.” Style icons included Bianca Jagger, Jane Birkin and Diana Ross.

Mick Jagger and Bianca Jagger watching the final cricket test between England and Australia at the Oval.

Mick Jagger and Bianca Jagger, pictured in 1972, were among the style icons of the era.

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There was a lot of news, but fewer ways to consume it. Some 95 percent of U.S. households owned televisions, according to Census data, and just three commercial broadcast networks dominated the airwaves: ABC, CBS and NBC. Total print newspaper circulation reached a record 62.5 million, before it began to drop.

Reflecting on Pong's video game success, 50 years later

And of course, it was a time of innovation — and not just in space. The digital watch made its debut. Atari published “Pong,” the first commercially successful arcade video game. Other key inventions from that year include the floppy disk, the first handheld scientific calculator (the HP-35) and the Hacky Sack. McDonald’s Egg McMuffin entered test markets, and Shrinky Dinks were on the brink of creation.

According to Merriam Webster, some of the words recorded in print for the first time in 1972 include: animatronic, beer pong, bird flu, habanero, garage band, glam rock, lowrider, page-turner, sound bite, spaghetti strap, veggie burger, women’s studies and yard sale. Far out!