With gas and airline prices soaring and summer vacation on the brain, I've been trying to figure out ways to enjoy the summer while staying close to home.

So when I was invited to Spa Luce, which just opened at the Hollywood Renaissance Hotel in Hollywood, I booked a five-part ritual Japanese massage treatment that used Red Flower products, which not only smell great (I love the Spanish Gardenia) but meet discerning yogi, green standards. I was buffed and scrubbed and rubbed into a blissfully relaxing state and the only yoga pose I had to think about was savasana.

Spa Luce also uses Spa Ritual nail products, all which are vegan and free of scary chemicals like DBP, Toluene and Formaldhyde. I picked up a bottle called (and I blush) "Aroused" and it's a friendly shade of summer red, perfect for toe gazing during shoulder-stand.

Forgive me today as I digress from serious yoga talk but sometimes I find beauty talk almost as relaxing as a good gentle yoga class. I often wonder why and I think the answer lies in a Mel Gibson/Helen Hunt movie called “What Women Want.” Bear with me here, I know we haven’t gotten over Mel and his anti-semitic “sugar tits” rant. But there’s a brilliant scene in the movie. The premise is that Mel has a gift — he can hear women’s thoughts, the subtext, the ruminations, the real feelings, all of it. But when he goes to the beauty department at Bloomingdales in NYC he’s befuddled b/c all he can “hear” in the women’s heads is idle chatter about lipstick and moisturizer and eye liner.

Those conversations are like Zen. There is nothing else present. No future, no past, just make-up. Moisturizer. Nail polish. Even acne control. So pure. And perverse.

Perhaps I should not admit these things here but I wonder, do you have any guilty relaxing pleasures?