Less stress through care?

Luxury care promotes anti-stress effects

What functions can luxury care take on? More than just majestically caring for the skin and keeping it young? Obviously, cosmetics also fulfill other, deeper needs. The Cologne-based rheingold salon conducted a study on behalf of Estée Lauder whose results should make the hearts of luxury cosmetics manufacturers beat faster. Because expensive creams help to relieve stress, and care rituals with high-quality cosmetics contain relaxing elements. They allow women to come to themselves, and also give them a feeling of wholeness, in which they can unfold their true beauty. According to this, 60 percent of women stated that care is a means of coping with stress, 79 percent find the regular use of day care relaxing, and 74 percent attribute this effect to night care.

Ines Imdahl Head of studies and Managing Director of the rheingold salon, notes that the relaxation times that luxury care can offer can be increased in so-called “mini-outbreaks” and “care excesses”. “A short vacation from everyday life in a spa, a visit to the beautician or a whole wellness week intensify the relaxation,” says Imdahl.

Basically, everything always starts with yourself. When was the last time I really took time for myself? This can be listening to music, going to the sauna, reading a good book or body and face care. Almost 70 percent of the study participants stated that they relax best when they have “time for themselves”. Facial care offers a promise of sensual pleasure and relaxation, which is what the stress study agrees on.

Defining stress is a difficult undertaking. Everyone talks about being under stress, but classifying stress is much more difficult because everyone experiences stress differently. “Stress in itself doesn’t really exist,” says Ines Imdahl. Stress arises when the person concerned experiences a discrepancy between their own wishes and external requirements and can no longer bring these two poles together. “You feel controlled by others - there is a conflict between what is your own and what is foreign,” emphasizes the psychologist and study director.

One solution is to achieve a certain amount of self-determination and to create so-called “me-moments”. These are situations where you can reconcile different requirements by focusing on yourself and making peace with yourself and the environment. “From a psychological point of view, these me-moments are the experience of a mental, physical and spiritual completion,” emphasized Ines Imdahl.

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