Nuru massage at the Schiphol hotels
Warm gel, body weight, and almost no friction: nuru is the Japanese technique in which the therapist works with her whole body rather than her hands, across a surface slick enough that skin passes over skin without catching. Nothing about it asks you to participate. For someone who has been awake nineteen hours and has nothing left to give a session, that is the whole appeal.
Origin and history
The material came first: a gel drawn from nori seaweed, long in use in Japanese bath houses before any technique was built around it. The format that carries the name was worked out in the soaplands of Kawasaki late last century, where the problem being solved was how to give a whole massage without the hands doing the work. Europe imported it in the 2000s more or less unchanged.
The technique
You do nothing, and doing nothing is the technique. Lying flat, arms wherever they fall, you are not asked to lift, turn or hold anything, she moves, and you are the surface she moves across. The passes run the whole length of the body rather than section by section, so there is no point at which one stroke ends and another begins. Turning over is the only instruction you will be given.
What to expect
A waterproof sheet goes over the bed first, and the gel, clear, odourless, seaweed-derived, is brought up to body temperature before anything begins. What follows is long, continuous and oddly quiet; there is no rhythm of press and release, only weight moving over you with no break in contact. Bodies that have been cold and cramped for hours tend to stop resisting inside the first ten minutes. A rinse in the room's shower clears the gel, and five minutes after that you are dry and ready to sleep.
Who it suits
Made for the arrival with nothing left in it. If you have been awake through two meal services and cannot face making conversation, this is the one that asks least of you.
Benefits
Deep warmth right through, and the heaviness that follows it, the closest thing on this menu to being set back down into your own body.
In your room, and only in your room. There is no studio and no incall option: the therapist travels to your hotel or apartment anywhere in central Amsterdam in forty to sixty minutes, the same figure in every district, and to the Schiphol airport hotels by arrangement, on enquiry.
Related techniques
If you are choosing between formats, these sit closest to Nuru Massage on the register: Body-to-Body Massage · Tantra Massage · Sensual Massage.
Nuru massage in an Amsterdam hotel room, gel and waterproof sheet carried in, or at a Schiphol airport hotel where the address allows it, arranged by message first.
Nuru Massage, the fare
The number you are quoted is the whole bill, and on most bookings half of it goes ahead as a deposit. A pair on one guest arrives together and bills twice the single hourly rate, and ninety minutes is billed at one and a half times the single hour.
Before you
ask
Does the room need a proper shower for this?
A working shower is the one real requirement. The gel is water-soluble and five minutes clears it entirely. Airport rooms are usually fine on that count, but send the hotel name when you message and we will say if anything about the room is likely to be awkward.
My skin is wrecked from the flight. Is gel a bad idea?
Usually the opposite. It carries no fragrance and no alcohol, sits on the skin rather than drying into it, and rinses off leaving nothing behind. If you react to seaweed-derived products, say so and take erotic oil instead.
Ninety minutes or an hour?
Ninety. The gel has to come up to temperature and the technique has no short version, an hour spends too much of itself arriving. If sixty minutes is genuinely all the gap allows, erotic oil will give you more of it.
Can nuru be arranged at an airport hotel at four in the morning?
By arrangement, like every Schiphol booking. Send the hotel name, the time you expect to be in the room and a note that it is nuru, because the sheet and the gel travel with her, and the thread settles what that address allows at that hour. Bookings in central Amsterdam keep their forty-to-sixty-minute arrival window at four in the morning too.
