Sins and sensibility

If you're feeling the comedown after a gluttonous long weekend, we can help. Whether it was chomping too much chocolate or drinking too freely on Easter Sunday, forget about detoxing. Turn your vice into a virtue instead with these treatments...

Chocolate

Lashings of chocolate all over your body - sounds like the fulfilment of a naughty sexual fetish. It may be, but it's also a means to silky smooth skin and feeling good enough to eat - the chocolate scrub at the Pennyhill Park spa is perfectly edible.

It's made from highly moisturising sheen-inducing shea butter mixed with cocoa powder, coarse muscovado sugar (a natural exfoliant) and various other skin nourishing and aromatic ingredients. And being slathered from neck to foot in it helps you empathise with the inside of a cake tin.

The scrub is followed by a tenminute shower and an hour-long vanilla and citrus body oil massage, which ensures you don't leave ponging like a chocolate factory.

Quite what the choc added health-wise, I'm still not sure. They said it's luxurious and an aphrodisiac and that's good enough for me.

The spa at Pennyhill Park. Tel: 01276 471 774, www.exclusivehotels.co.uk

Wine

If your sin of choice is wine, there's a highly rated health spa that encourages all things vinous. Set in Bordeaux, Les Sources De Caudalie uses as the basis of its 'vinotherapy' treatments the humble grape seed, containing 'polyphenols with an antioxidant [ie anti-ageing-Sake effect greater than both vitamins C and E'.

The spa uses a natural spring to create delights such as the red wine bath (spring water mixed with red wine extract and organic essential oils) - the only bath water you'll ever be tempted to drink.

Add a Merlot wrap, where you're left to stew in Bentonite clay and oils, a Pulp Friction Massage and a Premier Grand Cru facial, and you'll be ready to sashay off to dinner - and enjoy the extensive wine list.

My most memorable sake experience, I totally forgot. It was only the next morning that the memory of those wicked saketinis (gin, sake and vermouth) crept up on me. In contrast, Calmia's Fresh Japanese Ritual uses sake for good. It uses the purifying benefits of rice (sake is rice bran and water fermented with a koji rice) to soften the skin and seal in moisture.

After a hot sake and peach soak that is almost neat at 50 per cent, you're moved to the bed for a right royal scrubbing with Brown Sugar Body Polish. You're then basted in body butter and left to marinate - distracted by nothing but a shiatsu facial and the rhythmic rumblings of some enlightened yogi.

You positively float into the shower and it's only the prospect of a final sake slather - a beautiful dry oil from Fresh - that will persuade you back onto the slab. Enlightenment costs.

A two-hour Japanese Sake Ritual is £160. But that's less than my New York bar tab. And I feel like a million dollars. Not hungover.

... or a curry and a beer

Ghee, a butter used in curries, is also used in Ayurvedic treatments, such as Pancha karma massage, to aid purification and rejuvenation. Liberal amounts of ghee are applied externally (warmed and massaged into the skin) and internally to loosen toxins from deep connective tissues.

The good news is you move toxins from the periphery of the body into the gastrointestinal tract. The bad news is you're left smelling of baby's vomit. Never mind: finish things off with a beer hair wash - an age-old method of adding volume and sheen to your bonce.