The heated lava Stone Spa Bed at Nao Salon + Spa.   (Photo: Jeremy Liebman)

• Dragon Magic

  Nao Salon + Spa, 609 Madison Ave., 212-752-1111

  If detoxification treatments are like car washes—they might get rid of surface dirt, but once you’re back on the street, your tension comes rushing back—Dragon Magic ($350) is closer to a thorough engine tune-up. The Japanese creators have taken the seemingly normal (passive exercise, sweat lodge, fusion massage, hydrotherapy) and imbued it with everlasting weirdness in the name of revving up your body’s metabolism. There’s a machine that vibrates you until your teeth chatter; a session spent atop a heated slab of Mt. Fuji lava rock; a massage that is part grunt session, part electronic (and all transcendent); and something called a “soft pack” that’s akin to a water bed but too complicated to explain. You’ll leave cleansed, relaxed, with gorgeous skin, and completely ravenous.

From the 2007 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine