There is a lot of debate on the internet about what attire is appropriate to wear in a sauna in your gym’s locker room. Many of the blogosphere’s self-appointed etiquette experts say that there is no greater horrorthan nudity in the locker room sauna. We respectfully disagree.
There is a sauna in the locker room in my gym. Just like you see on the workout floor, there is a huge variety of what people wear in the sauna. Many believe there are no wrong ways to use a sauna, but there are definitely some wrong things to wear into the sauna.
This list applies no matter what kind of sauna you are going in: infrared sauna, Finnish sauna, portable sauna, and even a steam room.
Here is our list of what to wear in the sauna from best to worst.
Best Sauna Attire: Nothing
We’ve said it here many times before. The sauna is a bath. It is a way to clean and exercise your skin. The best way to sauna is naked with all of your skin exposed to the heat. As you are in there, you don’t have to worry about any clothing getting soaked with sweat, and when you get out, you don’t need to worry about your clothes holding heat.
Of course, don’t forget you still need a towel to sit or lay on while you are in the sauna. Unless it’s your own personal sauna, you don’t want to leave your sweaty butt prints on someone else’s sauna benches. (Worse still, you don’t want to pick something up from a sweaty butt print someone else left on the sauna bench). Even if it is your own sauna, protecting the wood from your body oils will help make your sauna benches last longer.
If you are modest, you can wrap yourself in a towel or sarong while in the sauna. Although we find that trying to keep a towel properly positioned, especially those too-small ones gyms like to give out, while you get in and out of the sauna is more embarrassing than just letting it all hang out.
Second Place: A Swimsuit
In many parts of the world, nudity is expected in the sauna. However, there are times, like at a hotel or club, where the sauna is poolside, in a mixed public area. At other times, the bath house or spa with your sauna is coed and they need coverage. This is especially true at saunas in the English-speaking parts of the world. Since you’ll be sweating profusely in the sauna, a swimsuit is a good compromise when you have to wear something.
An older bathing suit where the fabric has started to lose its elasticity is a good choice for the sauna. This way it’s a little loose, and you won’t mind getting it sweaty. Another advantage with old swimwear is that there is a pretty good chance you’ve proven it is colorfast and won’t lose its colors when you jump in the shower, pool or hot tub after your sauna.
If you are going to wear a swimsuit in the sauna, don’t wear it under your clothes. You want to change into it there, preferably just before you use the sauna. All of pollutants you’ve picked up from the environment can travel into your skin once you start sweating in the sauna.
Also, rinse off between the pool and the sauna. You don’t want to leave a sweat slick in the pool, and you don’t want to release chlorine vapors in the sauna! If you can, it is best if you take off your suit while you shower.
Don’t forget to sit on a towel when you are in the sauna. Your bare skin should not touch the wood of the sauna benches.
Men’s Swimsuits
For men, any pair of loose-fitting swim trunks is good to wear in the sauna. If you can find them, a swimsuit made from a natural fiber like bamboo or cotton are the best choices. If not, look for something made from a non-stretchy synthetic like nylon or microfiber. The heat from the sauna can damage elastic fibers.
Women’s Swimsuits
Finding a good women’s swimsuit for the sauna is a more difficult challenge. Most women’s suits are designed as form-fitting and are made with lots of Lycra or other stretchy synthetics. The heat from the sauna will damage these fibers and cause them to lose their elasticity, leaving you with a baggy suit. You also should be careful about the dyes used in women’s suits: There are stories of women who went in the sauna with a colored suit, then afterwards went for a swim and ended up with a white suit! The heat of the sauna caused the dye to release.
When wearing a swimsuit in the sauna, try to avoid suits that have slimming panels or racing suits. The compression of these are going to restrict your breathing and make your time in the sauna very uncomfortable. Definitely avoid any suit with an underwire. The metal in the underwire will heat up quickly in any sauna and can burn you. Yikes!
For women, a bikini top with a pair of men’s style bottoms is your best bet. This gives you the least amount skin of coverage, and the best chance of finding a suit with little stretch to it. Of course, not every woman feels comfortable in a bikini. If you feel you need more coverage, look for a suit that at least has a liner made from bamboo or another natural material.
Honorable Mention: Cotton Clothes
A cotton tee-shirt and shorts are the norm in the coed areas of a Korean sauna. Others prefer a cotton sarong or other body wrap. While it is not the best for getting wet, clean, cotton clothes will allow your skin to breathe easily while you are in the sauna, and will not get damaged or evolve toxic compounds in the heat of the sauna. For those concerned about modesty, a longer legged short or even a pair of yoga pants could be a good choice.
Any clothing you plan to wear in the sauna should be clean, so you shouldn’t have worn them all day. If you are using the sauna correctly, you are going to get sweaty and you won’t want to wear those clothes anyway when you are done. Bring them with you and change into them when you are ready to sauna. Don’t wear any underwear in the sauna: Underwear tends to be constricting, and you want to be able to breathe easily. Ladies, don’t wear your bra in the sauna: They are constricting, usually made from synthetic materials and trust us, you don’t want an underwire in the sauna.
Unacceptable
There are a lot of things that we have seen people wear in the sauna that are not acceptable for sauna use. We’ve seen and heard of some strange ones over the years, so it’s going to be hard to list them all, but we’ll try to at least cover some of the most common ones.
Shoes: This is probably one of the worst offenses. There is all kinds of junk you pick up walking around all day. Bringing that into the sauna is a bad thing, plus the heat of the sauna when it lingers in your shoe is just going to make you susceptible to athlete’s foot. If you wear shower sandals when walking through the gym, make sure you leave them on the floor when you step on the benches.
Sauna Suits: It is our opinion that sauna suits should not be worn by anyone, ever. Especially in a sauna. Covering your whole body with plastic insulates your body from the heat of the sauna, eliminating most of the effects. Most sauna suits are made of PVC, which has a melting point lower than many saunas. PVC sauna suits give off toxic fumes and leaches toxic liquids for years after it was manufactured. You don’t want those compounds touching your skin, and you really don’t want to be breathing them in while you are in the sauna.
Sweat Suits: During wrestling season, we see a lot of young people going in the sauna wearing a full sweat suit with the hood pulled up. My guess is they are trying to cut weight before their next match. It does not do them any good. In the sauna, that sweat suit is going to act as an insulator from the heat of the sauna. It slows the progress of heat, so it’s going to take a lot longer in the sauna before they start to sweat, which is what they really want. If you’re going to cut weight in the sauna, go in naked, then put on your sweat suit when you can’t stand it anymore to slow your cool down.
Workout Clothes: You got all sweaty on the treadmill, and now you’re coming into the sauna with those same clothes on? Please.
Street Clothes: This is probably the worst offense. The fabric of your clothing picks up all sorts of chemical and biological compounds during the day. When you come into the sauna wearing these, you releasing them to everyone who is in there with you. Your modesty is not that sacred. Please get changed.
Sauna Laundry
This article would not be complete without a discussion of how to clean what you wore into the sauna. Many commercial laundry detergents are loaded with things like optical brighteners, foaming agents, perfumes and fabric sizing chemicals that you don’t want touching your body when you are in a sauna. Your best bet is to use an ultra gentle detergent meant for baby clothes, or even no detergent, just plain vinegar. Give everything an extra rinse to make sure as much soap is out as possible, and then dry everything normally.
However, if you’re going with the quick rinse in the sink method, don’t use the sauna as your dryer!
Even if you don’t use the sauna, if you wash your swimsuits this way, you will find that they last longer.
What do you prefer to wear in the sauna? Let us know in our poll.
Today is the first day of summer in the northern hemisphere and the first day of winter in the southern hemisphere. This is the time of year for a unique ritual at the south pole: New members are initiated into the 300 Club. Talk about contrast therapy.
The event takes place at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. On a day when the outside air temperature reaches -100°F (-73°C), a brave few fire up the sauna in the research station and set the temperature to 200°F (93°C). The participants warm themselves up in the sauna, then head outside into the cold. The bravest attempt circle the ceremonial south pole before headed back into the sauna to warm up. Of course, to qualify, you have to do it all naked except for your boots.
If you are planning a visit to the saunas and thermal baths in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and many other eastern European countries, the bath areas are shared, and textilfrei: No clothing is allowed in the bath area. For English-speakers, the idea that you need to shed all of your clothes and walk around naked among strangers, friends and co-workers can be a bit disconcerting — We have been programmed to equate our bodies with shame and nudity with sexuality.
In Europe, the sauna is a place to relax and socialize where everyone is equal. Part of that equality comes from being naked: everyone knows that you have nothing to hide.
To help show this, the Dutch production company Cake TV made the short film Naakt (Naked) in 2006 about a young boy’s first visit to the sauna with his mother. From personal experience, it is an accurate depiction of a visit to a textilfrei sauna.
This movie was originally shown at the 2006 Utrecht Film Festival and later broadcast on Dutch television. Were this to be broadcast in the USA, after the Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction” hoopla, this just might cause the entire FCC to explode. If you are reading this at work, it might be a very good idea to wait until you get home to watch it.
We are encouraged that SaunaScape readers are a fairly tolerant group. In our poll started two years ago, 86% of you would bare it all and head right in like a native if you encountered a nudist sauna at your hotel.
We saw this cartoon last week on the excellent web comic Indexed, and it got us thinking, about how many people are missing out on the joys of sauna because of poor body image.
We know our survey is biased, so we looked for some more mass-market validation. American newspaper USA Today has a poll running on its website asking if they would bare it all at the beach. 44% of the 16,000 respondents so far have said yes, and only 41% said no.
That 41% is about the same amount who said that they were unhappy with their bodies in a Glamour magazine survey of 16,000 of their readers from early 2009.
Most detailed and most telling was a survey by French pollsters IFOP. In April of 2009 they surveyed 1000 French women representative of the whole French population to gauge their attitudes about nudity and themselves. One expects the French to be liberal, but the poll results don’t seem to support this.
48% of French women said they are bothered by the sight of another woman’s naked body at a nude beach. 40% were bothered by another woman in a locker room.
When asked what situations they had personally been naked in public before, only 1/3 had ever been naked in a locker room, and only 13% had ever bared it all on a public beach.
The survey also asked the women whether or not they liked their bodies. 52% of French women do not. Women who liked their bodies a lot were three times as likely to bare it all in a locker room as those who didn’t like their bodies a lot, and were more than twice as likely to have visited a nude beach.
Going back to our webcomic at the top of this post, this French survey refutes her graph. Women over 65 were least likely to go naked in the locker room. Women between 35 and 49 were the most likely (30 vs 36%). However, more than half of all women under age 25 were bothered by the sight of another woman naked in the locker room.
If you know of any more resources on this, let us know in the comments.
Pleasure is the main goal, the enjoyment and indulgence, and the technique of waving the towel in the sauna. The best fragrance, the right dosage, the matching comment, maybe also a good joke at the right moment – all this and much more can create the best Sauna-Aufguss. We are looking for the most enjoyable Sauna Aufguss, the best “Wachler” (waver) or most talented Saunameister, we are looking for the Sauna world champion.
The competition was open to anyone in attendance at Therme Aqualux. Judging was carried out by the normal patrons in attendance in the sauna. Each member of the “Sit and Sweat Jury” in the sauna while the Aufgussiers were performing was given a full cup of water. Each jury member could pour as much of their water as they wanted into a measuring cup for the Aufgussier. The one with the greatest volume of water was declared the winner.
Italian Andreas Kofler was given the World Cup. Second place went to Benjamin Gaudreau from Germany. In third place was Günter Huther from Austria. There were 25 competitors in total.
A second competition was also run: Who could generate the most wind from a spinning towel. The winner among the 230 participants was Christian Govi generating a speed of 11.79 meters per second, or over 26 miles per hour. To ensure fairness, a local university brought their instruments to measure the speed.
Steam of Life, a documentary film that looks at several Finnish men baring first themselves in a sauna, then their souls to the camera, has been selected by Finland as their contender for the 2011 Foreign Language Academy Award.
The film, directed by Joonas Berghall and Mika Hotakainen that has been getting rave reviews on the film festival circuit, both for the frank reactions that their subjects give, and the beautiful cinematography. You can get a short glimpse of the film from its trailer (NSFW) on YouTube. At the moment, the film is available to save on Netflix.
What makes for beauty in women? How do we as a society perceive women as they age? I began with what were simple intentions. I wanted to photograph without sentiment or objectification women daring enough to stand, without embarrassment or excuse, before my camera and I wanted my photographs to be beautiful. . . . I drew upon classical gestures and poses of Baroque and Neoclassical painters and utilized the platinum printing process to assure a sense of timelessness, as if the older or ‘normal’ woman has always been a subject of the arts.
- Jeanette Williams
Williams is a professor of photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. For more background, you can read the review of the book in the New Yorker, or watch a video interview where she discusses her motivations and procedures.
For those of you looking to mimic the experience of the bathers in the book, and perhaps achieve their same level of relaxation, you can find information about the hammams of Istanbul and how to visit them on the helpful Hammam Guide website. If you’re looking for something more succinct, you might find it on Frommer’s, Lonely Planet, or Trip Advisor.
The center of the exhibition is a transparent sauna serves as a stage as five performers practice traditional Estonian sauna customs in front of the audience. The borderline between the audience and actors is completely blurred as the audience is invited to join the performers’ rituals in The Bathers. Participants must be over 18.
The Bathers has been previously been installed in Tallinn, Estonia, Riga Latvia, and Miami, Florida in the United States. A video on the Art Container website shows the assembly of the sauna and some of its prior installations.
The sauna stove appears to be wood-fired and use river stones to hold the heat. As is the custom in Estonian saunas, the sauna-goers enjoy it in the nude.
After a good sauna, it’s always nice to cool down naturally, by relaxing and letting the breeze gently take the heat away from your body. Of course, since the sauna is best enjoyed with as little clothing as possible, if you’re enjoying the sauna during the day, you probably want a good sunscreen.
Many sunscreens available in the U.S. may be the equivalent of modern-day snake oil, plying customers with claims of broad-spectrum protection but not providing it, while exposing people to potentially hazardous chemicals that can penetrate the skin into the body. When only 8 percent of sunscreens rate high for safety and efficacy, it’s clear that consumers concerned about protecting themselves and their families are left with few good options.
The risk of Melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, may be increased while wearing sunscreen, for some people.
High SPF products may be more harmful, suppressing sunburns, while allowing other skin damage to occur.
Sunscreen may inhibit the production of Vitamin D.
Vitamin A in sunscreen may speed the development of cancer.
Free radical damage from UV rays may be worse with sunscreen than it is on bare skin alone.
Hormone disruptors or Nanomaterials are present in most US sunscreen formulations.
European sunscreens are better than US sunscreens, because
The US FDA has lagged approving new compounds, and has spent 33 years developing a sunscreen safety policy.
The Environmental Working Group is a US Non-profit dedicated to educating the public about hidden toxic chemicals and working to change government policy that allow, promote or subsidize the use of these toxins.
There is a lot of debate on the internet about what attire is appropriate to wear in a sauna in your gym’s locker room. Many of the blogosphere’s self-appointed etiquette experts say that there is no greater horror than nudity in the locker room sauna. We respectfully disagree.
If you are planning a visit to the saunas and thermal baths in 
and 
of photos of women taken over an eight-year period in the public baths of Istanbul and Bursa. In her words:
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