Where it comes from
Foam massage has two ancestors and both are old. In the Turkish hammam an attendant fills a cotton cloth with soapy water, blows it into a mountain of lather and works it over a bather lying on warm marble, a ritual still kept alive in bathhouses across the old Ottoman cities. In Japan the public bath grew into a whole culture of washing as hospitality, where being bathed by someone else was the entire point of the visit. Bangkok's bathhouses joined the two ideas in the second half of the twentieth century and gave the result its blunt English name, with an air mattress on a tiled floor and a woman who used her own body as the sponge. The Amsterdam version keeps the mat and the lather and loses the tiled back room: it comes to you, in whatever bathroom your stay happens to have given you.