The sauna, and who it was made for

There are several traditions of heat, and today we confuse them under a single word. They do not do the same thing.

The Finnish sauna is dry and very hot. The hammam is humid and more temperate. The Japanese bath is hot water, still and long. The Russian banya adds birch and gesture.

These four practices were developed in four climates, for four ways of living, and they do not suit the same people.

What dry heat does

It dehydrates quickly and it unloads. You sweat a great deal, you lose water, you come out lighter and a little emptied.

It is a practice of subtraction. It suits those who have something in excess — heaviness, stagnation, a surplus that weighs.

It does not suit those who already lack. A fine, dry, economical person will leave a dry sauna in a worse state than they entered it, and will need two days to recover.

What humid heat does

It softens without drying. The hammam does not take water: it brings it, and it opens the surface instead of pulling at it.

It is a practice of suppleness. It suits almost everyone, and particularly natures that close up and tense.

It is also the only one of the four where facial care has historically had its place — the exfoliation, the clay, the oil afterwards. The dry does not lend itself to it.

The nature the sauna serves best

In the reading of the five natures, prolonged heat meets Water — the reserve, the depth, what holds beneath the surface and does not show itself.

This nature accumulates without saying so. It holds, it holds, then it lets go all at once. Heat is one of the rare practices that makes it move before the letting go, because it mobilises what had stagnated.

On condition — and this is the condition — that it is not already in deficit. An empty reserve is not heated: it is filled.

For whom it is more delicate

A heated nature, one that rises to the forehead and takes an hour to come back down, does not need more heat added. It will leave agitated rather than soothed, and will put that down to tiredness.

A fine and economical nature will lose in the dry what it did not have in excess.

The rule that holds for everyone

Leave before the end. The Finnish tradition keeps no records — you enter, you leave, you cool down, you begin again.

And never go in uncovered. Heat, like cold, is taken on a reserve.

The tell

The next morning, not the same evening.

The same evening, everyone sleeps well. The next day, natures diverge: some are full, others are hollowed out. What you observe at that moment tells you whether the practice was meant for you — and the answer depends neither on your taste for heat, nor on your endurance.

It depends on the nature that is yours, and that one can be read from the very beginning.