::A Geek in Korea::

My wife, her mother, and an aunt arranged to go to a sauna for the afternoon. My wife was excited, as she was going to “come back clean”. The shower facilities we have in our home aren’t up to true Korean standards of cleanliness. To be truly clean requires a trip to a hot spring sauna.

It’s common for people to arrange to go to a sauna once a month or so to do some more detailed “scrubbing” of their body. They use abrasive hand towel to scrub off the layers of dead skin and collagen called “tae“. This tae comes off in black clumps on your skin when you scrub hard enough, much like an eraser will leave blackened detritus on your paper after a vigorous erasing. This is what they are seeking to remove. The idea is that by scrubbing off the dead skin, you’ll leave your remaining skin smoother, free of body oils, and fresh.

The special towel they use is called an “Italy towel” or “tae mil-e towel” (literally, tae removal towel) in Korean. The texture is what you would find for scrubbing difficult dishes in the kitchen. It’s not a Brillo pad, but it’s pretty rough to use on skin. The one my wife loaned me left my skin feeling like it had been deeply scratched after a few rubs.

The procedure at the hot spring sauna is as follows:

1. Take a soapy shower. This is to keep the water in the hot spring as clean as possible for other bathers.

2. Hop in a hot water sauna bath for five to ten minutes to make the skin easy to scrub.

3. Get out of the bath then go to the special area set up. There are seats and mirrors with individual shower wands to help your scrubbing. Start scrubbing your entire body free of “tae“. It’s best to go with someone you know so they can scrub your back.

(Note: At some saunas you can hire professional “scrubbers” also called “tae mil-e” that sit in the saunas for this purpose. They are easy to find since they are the only people wearing clothes in the sauna area. For a small fee, they’ll scrub you too.)

4. Wash yourself off, with a body shampoo and soap.

5. Enjoy your tae free body.

Koreans can sometimes take their obsessive cleaning habits to the extreme. This is an example of how far people go to stay clean and look good. My wife really liked going with her relatives for a scrubbing. She came back with some abrasion marks on her skin that make me think they were using rough sandpaper though.

The first time you get an offer from a Korean person wanting to wash your back in a same-sex sauna, is very disturbing. I had no idea that there were people that did that for a job the first time I went to a sauna. I did not take anyone up on their offer to scrub my back.

Westerners have a lot of issues when confronted with semi-public nudity, but the offer to have a relative, acquaintance, or worse yet a complete stranger offer to scrub your back is a little too much. We’ve got a “personal bubble” that’s been ingrained in us from a very young age, and that’s just not easily rewritten brain firmware.

It’s not for me to judge what other people want to do to feel “clean”, but next time I hope my wife doesn’t return from the hot springs looking so battle worn, as if she lost a fight with a power sander.