Honey and Milk Treatment is Top Couple’s Pick at Sunstone Spa

At Sunstone Spa in Rancho Mirage, guests can experience the replenishing and restorative effects of honey, which has been used in beauty and health treatments around the world for centuries, by booking the Milk and Honey Retreat.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY SHUTTERSTOCK

The benefits of honey are so much more than the sweet, amber drizzle on your oatmeal or a spoonful in your tea. Delicious as those may be, this beloved nectar has also augmented beauty rituals through the ages as a not-so-secret ingredient thanks to its skin-conditioning superpowers.

The richness of this everyday delicacy has made the Milk and Honey Retreat the most sought-after way to enjoy a sweethearts’ day at Sunstone Spa, a Forbes Five-Star retreat inside Agua Caliente Resort Casino Spa Rancho Mirage. The treatment’s decadent recipe blends an immersive coconut-milk bath, a skin-smoothing sugar scrub, and a restorative couple’s massage into one side-by-side extravaganza that embodies the very word “romance.” You’ll emerge relaxed and glowing, with ultra soft skin and a calm, centered state of mind, ready to be your best selves again.

The makings of this two-hour experience are as old as time itself. Ancient Egyptians stirred honey into medicines and cosmetics, keenly aware it would aid the body inside and out. Cleopatra, Nefertiti, and Queen Anne are only a few of the famed figures who turned to milk and honey for their baths, facials, or lotions. As a destination, the Coachella Valley—a “land of milk and honey” in its own right—has beckoned those seeking respite among the desert-and-mountain surroundings. The Milk and Honey Retreat honors both these historic moisturizers and our sense of place.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY GETTY IMAGES

At Sunstone Spa, raw Fiji honey forms the basis of the Milk and Honey treatment. Sourced from the nectar of coconut and mango flowers, this honey is a deep-reaching humectant that naturally enhances skin’s moisture retention. When married with vitamin-rich coconut milk, the combination is pure spa magic, locking in moisture while improving cell production.

Guests soften up to the treatment from the first encounter, returning to sample its transportive scents and skin-smoothing benefits again and again.

Paradise begins by stepping into the couple’s spa suite and losing yourselves to the clock. For 120 blissful minutes, you’ll find yourselves floating on a honey cloud as wafts of coconut fill the air and your skin transforms from dry and needy to supple and nourished. Coconut milk infused with Fiji honey is formulated to heal, quench, and hydrate the skin from start to finish.

Extracts from coconut and mango flowers rise from the warm milk-and-honey soak while you relax in a tub for two. Next, you’ll glide across the room to the tables where an exfoliation of coconut sugar scrub awaits, renewing your skin, sloughing away dead cells, and making way for a softer, smoother you. When you rinse off the scrub, its residual oils remain, absorbing into the skin with the honey-infused coconut oil of your hydrating massage. Heated stones work to loosen muscles and melt stress away.

All the while, the fragrance— a classic union of two familiar scents—is warm and comforting. Afterward, it’s easy to agree: This service might become a regular treat to yourselves, a gift of time together and self-care that makes a sweet pick-me-up any time of year.

To prolong your spa day, ease into everything Sunstone Spa has to offer. Consider an add-on session in the new halotherapy booth, where micro ions of salt clear your head and improve your breathing, sleep, and any symptoms of allergies or asthma. Lounge pre- or post-service in the co-ed relaxation room or take a dip in the co-ed pool. If you slip away to experience the grounding chairs, steam room, and sauna in the men’s and women’s lounges, rendezvous later under a private cabana in the courtyard, where a Whirlpool and singing bowls encourage further unwinding and complete the meditative space.

Just like the irresistible taste of an exceptional honey, the Milk and Honey Retreat leaves you wanting to experience it again. Re-create the experience at home with products from Sunstone’s boutique. The Coconut Milk and Honey Bath Soak, Sugar Scrub, Hydrating Lotion, Nourishing Oil, and Body Butter all embody the popular treatment. If the promise of consistently soft skin doesn’t entice you, the fragrance will. The scent of pure relaxation is an instant vacation to the tropics, the desert, or wherever you envision your personal retreat to a land of milk and honey.

When You Go

Sunstone Spa at Agua Caliente Rancho Mirage
32250 Bob Hope Drive
760-202-2121
Open daily 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
hotwatercasino.com

what are humectants?

Humectants are ingredients that appear in many cosmetic and skin-care products (lotions, serums, balms, etc.) because of their hydrating properties. By forming hydrogen bonds with water molecules, humectants help draw water from lower cell layers and moisturize the skin. They can be man-made or found in nature (like the raw Fiji honey used in Sunstone Spa’s Milk and Honey Retreat).

This article appears in the Spring/Summer 2022 edition of Me Yah Whae, a publication of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians. To view the digital edition, click HERE.