What's an Emotional Shower, and Why Is It on My Spa Menu?

Showers may have a monopoly on everyday cleansing, but bathtubs own luxury. Aside from good water pressure, attractive tiles, and walk-in enclosures, there have long been few better ways to upgrade the shower than there are the bathroom tub: Moisturizing bombs, salt soaks, whirlpool jets, “bath menus,” candles, and even expertly positioned TVs that let you stay watch game shows feel like the pinnacle of hotel luxury—plus, you get to lie down. But now, in a surprising twist, it might be the humble shower's turn in the spotlight: High-end hotels around Italy are harnessing the power of the bathtub's lesser sibling to offer something new and immerse guests in carefully designed temperatures, colors, water pressures, and aromatherapies.

“Emotional showers” are an increasingly common fixture of luxury Italian spas—and they are not what they sound like. I’ve experienced a lifetime of emotional showers (read: sobbing under running water), but here the term is a somewhat odd translation of “una doccia emozionale,” which might more aptly be called a “sensory shower.”

Most emotional showers offer different modes of water pressure, from hard rainfall to fine mists that correspond to specific lights and sounds. The intention is to engineer an emotional state, whether invigoration, serenity, or something in between, and to increase blood circulation. (It should be noted that most emotions, for example jealousy, disdain, and hilarity, are not on the menu.) Paramount to the experience is chromotherapy—the idea that colors offer different health and emotional benefits; here, colored light illuminates around you in an almost discoteca-like fashion.

Lake Como property Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni offers two types of preset sensory showers which incorporate automatic light settings, aromatherapy scents, and mist intensities.

Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni, a luxurious 150-year-old estate perched on the edge of Lake Como in Bellagio, recently unveiled a newly renovated spa. Anointed “Luce del Lago,” or light of the lake, the tranquil new facilities are bathed in hues reflecting the water, shore, and sky of the surrounding landscape. There’s a focus on hydrotherapy, the centerpiece of which is a dreamy indoor pool with bubbles and currents that evoke the gently rolling lake, right beside a sauna and…an emotional shower.

The sensory shower offers two settings that are controlled by a button: a refreshing cool mist perfumed with oceanic oak moss and white musk, and an invigorating mango-fragranced “tropical rain,” both released from overhead. When I tried it the cool-mist setting bathed me in soft blue light, while the tropical rain paired with a stimulating red. I alternated back and forth between the two, relieved that neither temperature was scalding nor icily akin to the trendiness of cold-plunge circuits. I felt at once serene and energized.

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Italy has a long tradition of hydrotherapy, from the thermal waters and volcanic mud treatments of Ischia to the sulfur hot springs of Tuscany. While working and living in Italy I’ve noticed that, even casually, Italians are often attuned to the therapeutic potential of water temperature and moisture; they have on more than one occasion suggested I caught stomach flu from drinking water that was too cold. But the term “emotional shower” can be confusing to English speakers. In a 2016 Tripadvisor forum, for instance, a guest at a resort in Atrani, Italy, asked what it meant after seeing it on the spa menu. “I was hoping to laugh, cry, and love in the shower. Unfortunately we simply emerged from the experience wet, mildly disoriented, and smelly.”

A few years ago, when I encountered my first emotional shower at Monteverdi Tuscany’s spa, I beelined for the hammam, ignoring the shower all together. But the next day I returned, curious, to find it had three temperature settings and colors—and the novelty intrigued me. My first sensory shower did help me rinse off the outside world and switch into spa-mode. One hotel outside of Padova in Abano Terme, a town known for its hot springs and mud baths, describes the color experience of its emotional showers as follows: “The blue is soothing and refreshing, the red gives strength; orange transmits positive feelings and emotions, such as cheerfulness; green gives balance, serenity and concentration.”

But the emotional shower health claims can also be extreme. On its website, Aquademy, an Italian company that sells the product, totes “toxins expulsion and bloodstream improvement” as a benefit, as well as a “completely restored immune response.” In its resource on hydrotherapy, the Cleveland Clinic offers a bit of perspective: “People with several [health] conditions can benefit from using water in different forms and at different temperatures to feel better … It’s never a bad thing to find a safe way to feel better, but you shouldn’t expect hydrotherapy to cure any condition—especially more serious, chronic diseases.”

These days, in my mind, relaxation in itself is beneficial enough, and I found buckets of it during my spa treatment at the Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni, which offered another upgraded shower experience—this one, entirely horizontal. In a treatment called Senses, spa manager Serena Gilardoni directed me to lay on a water mattress under a horizontal-style shower, which would release chilly Vichy spring water from five shower heads above me, as the room cycled through relaxing colors. (The official name for this bed-shower machine is Aemotio, and it's an Italian invention.)

To begin, my therapist massaged me with a coarse citrus scrub, then wrapped me in a sheet that collected the hot steam releasing around me as if I was a kind of moisture burrito. After ten or so minutes, during which she iced my face and performed a brief facial treatment, the therapist lifted off the sheet and turned the shower heads on one by one: starting above my feet, then above my thighs, then my stomach, until I was getting sprayed up to my neck with cool water and the scrub washed off. It occurred to me—laying on a water mattress and surrounded by steam as ice traced my face—that I was interacting with water in every one of its forms. And as the cool spring water rained down, I became a car in an emotional car wash—a little chilly and totally exposed.

It turns out that a shower can be one of the best places for catharsis. Throw in jet lag, billowing steam, and the surrender of lying down, and I have to admit I found myself getting a little weepy.