by Down a dirt road in Desert Hot Springs, Calif., about 12 miles outside of Palm Springs, We Care Spa has been welcoming the Hollywood and fashion crowds for 38 years.
Donna Karan, Tom Ford, Venus Williams, hairdresser Sally Hershberger, actor Matt Bomer, actress Abigail Spencer and others pay more than $1,000 a night to eat nothing and experience a regime enlightened of daily colonics, sludgy detox drinks and sound baths at the 100- acre oasis, which was made luxury glow up.
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“It’s like going home,” says Karan, who has been to We Care more times than she can count. “It’s definitely a cleanse, but it’s a spiritual aspect of the cleanse and it gives you the time and space to work with some of the most amazing people.”
“The first day you miss food, the second day you’re so hungry you can eat your hand and the third day you could starve yourself for the rest of your life,” says Ariana Lambert Smeraldo of Lily Lodge Los Angeles, who is in the spotlight. to florist for The Row, Staud, Carolina Herrera and others, and was at We Care about a dozen times. “It’s like Ozempic without Ozempic.”
Visitors enter wellness nirvana by walking past a subterranean glass vitrine of healing crystals into a relaxed, light-filled living room where all the action is centered on the lobby bar.
Except here, though, the cocktails are the liquids that are the building blocks of the We Care program, including the Organic Detox Powdered fiber drink with an aloe juice chaser designed to tone things down; blood purification and liver detoxification teas; mint, lemon and citrus waters, and the night vegetable soups that hungry guests await so eagerly arrive at 5 pm you’d think they flew in from Noma.
We Care has always had a certain mystique in Southern California, largely because of the daily colonics, which involve inserting a tube into the bum to flush water, coffee, chlorophyll and other things into the bowel, and release waste. pressure. and toxins, which can be seen as they move out, thanks to a mirror strategically placed above the treatment table. Yes, really.
Of course, in today’s age of hyper-fitness, when green juice is available at the local 7-Eleven and mom micro-doses, people are more sensitive to these kinds of things, and the daily 30-minute colon hydrotherapy sessions are taken face. at most guests, although a few snickers.
Spencer calls “We Care” her “sanctuary” and says it’s integrated into her wellness routine. “My dirty little secret was that I was always sick from my late 20s to my 30s and retreating to We Care really improved my health from the inside out.”
Founder Susana Belen, now 86 years old, started the program in 1986 to get her own health back on track after a difficult divorce, then began teaching fasting and detoxification to friends and family in her a two bedroom adobe style house, that is. still part of the Spa property.
Friends told friends, and they wanted to come, too. So Belen set about her home, organically growing We Care. Designers and models began to visit to prepare for fashion weeks, while the stars prepared for awards season, in a decidedly rustic environment where guests mixed their own detox drinks.
Belen’s daughter Susan Lombardi, exhausted from her career working as a commercial model in Paris and a fashion buyer for the Soho Generation store in New York, joined her in 1990 to take over the business side, leading the spa towards higher up the market. . She added luxe amenities such as the main sparkling pool and pool bar, a world-class gymnasium, infrared sauna and steam room, and enhanced the grounds with a medicine wheel, a meditation pyramid and an ancient labyrinth.
There are now 28 guest rooms and suites spread across a sweeping desert landscape with mountain views, bougainvillia trees and Buddha heads. The rooms have oversized soaking tubs, circadian light systems, yoga mats, rebounder trampolines and weights for those with exercise energy, which most return after a few days of fasting.
Two new villas are due to be completed by the end of the year for those who want a little more privacy.
Donna Karan’s many visits, and a room that Lombardi specially designed for her in particular, inspired the move to create a more luxurious experience.
“Donna would come back here when we were in my mother’s driveway,” Lombardi recalls. “After we expanded a little, there was one room in the corner, and I decided to put $70,000 worth of flagstone in there and make it nice for Donna. And the next thing you know every customer who had money wanted it.… That showed me the demand was there.”
“I’m so proud of them,” says Karan. “[Susana] is amazing. What she created, with her daughter with all her love and even greater potential, is nowhere like it.”
The beauty and wellness options have also increased in recent years. There are more than 40 treatments to choose from, including Agent Nateur facials, mud detoxes, system recovery wraps with castor oil targeting gut health, Shamanic healing, and myofascial release in an outdoor tent. Classes can range from yoga and nutrition to digital detox and weekly fire ceremonies.
“I love how intimate but not so personal, how you can be talkative or alone, as spiritual or not,” Smeraldo says of the vibe. “I never felt like if I wasn’t participating, I was doing something wrong.”
“Back in the day, it was more like the hippies sharing rooms and sharing the bathroom. We would be on the phone with them explaining what a colony is and why,” says Lombardi, still a fashionista who was banished on a recent afternoon in the desert in all-black Chanel. “But as people have continued to come and get such great results and take off, to where we are today, their expectations have changed and they want to know if the freeze dried product, does it come from Mexico,” she said. the consumer has become educated and eager to take the product home, which has led to more offers in that department as well.
In the past, people came to quit smoking, now they often come to quit sugar – and improve their mental and spiritual health, she says.
“We don’t really promote it as weight loss, but weight loss is a side benefit. The other is the inner peace that you get when you’ve been here long enough to do inner work, to ground yourself, to have some vision and some direction in your life, and the autophagy understand,” she says of the theory that fasting results in cellular recycling. “That’s why you leave here and feel great, or the person with arthritis forgets their cane and we have to send it to them in the post. We’re like the beefed-up version of the trout tapa. So it’s much more than weight loss.”
Since COVID-19, there has been a surge of interest in the spiritual side, she says. “It’s like opening up Pandora’s box. If you’re going to a therapist during the work day, you leave your laptop for an hour and then go back to it. It’s a completely different thing if you’re here for three, five, eight, 10 days, peeling away the layers. If you work with a therapist while you’re here, you can dive into level 10, so everyone is booking that and asking for it.”
In the high season, which is in the desert winter and early spring, there are often waiting times of two or three months to reserve a room at We Care. But the spa is looking for its next locations, possibly in Florida or Mexico.
And Belen is still in her element every day, walking the land and teaching her “Seven Steps to Health & Rejuvenation” classes to groups that include more Millennials and Gen Zers, girls who will take tourists and mother-daughter duos, too. . “Their mission is to help people one-on-one, and then I use my creative and business ideas, so we make a good team,” says Lombardi.
“Every day someone stops me and says thank you, I’ve changed and I feel good. Why will I stop doing that?” Belen says when asked about the retirement. “I’m helping a lot of people. Nothing special, I don’t teach science, I tell them what I know. It’s common sense.”
We Care Spa, 18000 Long Canyon Road, Desert Hot Springs, Calif., wecarespa.com; two-night packages start at $2,019, seven-night packages at $6,149, and reservations are expected at least two months in advance.
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