I’ve never felt weird about paying a stranger to touch me. Massages, facials, martial arts, for me it’s all just body work. That was until I booked my first professional backscratch with Julie Luther, founder of Soft Touch ASMR Spa in Pasadena.
Something about it makes me nervous when someone touches me gently. In part, because it’s the kind of physical interaction you’d expect from your closest friends. When I was a child, I remember someone I loved tracing patterns on my skin or playing with my hair. As we grow up in modern society, in between meetings and mindless scrolling, such touches become increasingly rare, almost a luxury.
Luther understands this tension well. She has built her business around recreating the cozy moments of childhood that many people find deeply healing, yet surprisingly rare as adults. Her treatments bring ASMR, short for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, into the physical world through intentional gentle touch. Scratching your back with a metal finger extension or tracing your face with a feathered wand, it’s the subtle, soothing sounds that emanate from these careful movements on and across your skin. Through your hair.
Julie Luther is a masseuse in Pasadena. While working in New York’s cutthroat fashion industry, she became drawn to rituals like ASMR.
In 2007, Luther was under stress in New York’s cutthroat fashion industry, running on four hours of sleep between a full-time job and a post-college internship. She found herself craving the same calming rituals that had helped her mother and grandmother. As a child, I fell asleep playing with my hair and scratching my back.
“There has never been anything more relaxing,” she said.
Luther returned to work in the fashion industry. But as she watched ASMR grow in popularity, she saw potential in the type of content she had always wanted to see. When the pandemic hit in 2020, she finally had the time to act and launched Friends with ASMR. She brought some friends over from her isolation pod and began filming the tender videos of her back scratching and hair brushing that she’d always wanted to see.
Eventually, viewers started asking for in-person sessions, and Luther, whose YouTube channel now has more than 72,000 subscribers, found himself with an unexpected business opportunity.
“Research shows that the brains of people experiencing ASMR experience a spike in neural activity in brain regions associated with emotion, reward, empathy, and social cognition,” says UCLA Health Integrative Medicine. said Dr. Elizabeth Coe, the community’s medical director.
According to Dr. Elizabeth Coe, medical director of the UCLA Health Integrative Medicine Collaborative, the tingling sensations that give ASMR its reputation (a pleasant cascading sensation that runs from the head to the shoulders) only affect about 20% of people. It is said that he is receiving it. But that didn’t stop researchers from investigating what happens in the brain during these experiences.
“Studies have shown that the brains of people experiencing ASMR experience spikes in neural activity in brain regions associated with emotion, reward, empathy, and social cognition,” Koh said. .
Koh said scientific interest in ASMR activities has increased significantly, with research suggesting that they may temporarily reduce depression and chronic pain in some individuals. Koh says ASMR practices, when combined with gentle touches such as scratching the back or braiding hair, may provide additional benefits through the release of oxytocin, a hormone associated with relaxation and social bonding. said.
Researchers are still investigating whether people who aren’t sensitive to ASMR can benefit from these habits, but Koh said, “We don’t know if ASMR is physiologically weird or if it’s a potential therapeutic tool. I don’t know yet.”
Julie Luther at a massage studio in Pasadena.
Luther has seen this play out in her own practice, where she says her clients fall into two broad camps. Most people are trying to recreate the pleasant experiences of childhood when family members played with their hair or scratched their backs. Some people turn to her because traditional massages are often painful. Luther speaks about this from personal experience. But she also sees clients who have never experienced nurturing touch, including those who are trying to rebuild relationships through skin contact after a traumatic experience.
“They’re trying to relearn what safe touch and nurturing touch is,” Luther said.
Luther’s practice is only for women and non-binary clients, a boundary she set after a male client ignored a consent form during a session and requested that his feet be tickled. She has enough customers so it won’t hurt her business.
Luther works in a quiet room rented from an acupuncturist in downtown Pasadena with views of the nearby mountains. Luther offers three tiers of service, each named according to the family’s level of comfort. “Best Friend” ($75 for 20 minutes), “Sister” ($150 for 50 minutes) and “Grandma” ($210 for 80 minutes of “Grandma-level pampering”). .
I chose The Best Friend partly because of its journalistic efficiency, but mostly out of a bit of nervousness. All packages contain the same elements, such as scratching the back, tracing patterns on the arms and face, brushing and finger combing the hair, just at different times. Short sessions felt like a safe way to dip a toe in these nurturing waters.
I stripped down to my underwear, got on the massage table, and lay face down under the blanket. Luther came in and spoke in a whisper to help set my intentions for the session to just relax.
Luther offers three tiers of service, each named according to the family’s level of comfort. “Best Friend” ($75 for 20 minutes), “Sister” ($150 for 50 minutes) and “Grandma” ($210 for 80 minutes of “Grandma-level pampering”). .
Table of tools that ASMR masseuse and content creator Julie Luther uses during her sessions.
On her YouTube channel, most of her videos feature this type of ASMR whispering, but her in-person sessions are different. After the initial whispered guidance, she usually remains silent so that the client can focus on the sensations in their body. She started on my back using only her usual nails, but it was still enough to make my muscles jump at her touch, tickling slightly and almost surprising me at the sensation.
Next came Luther’s most popular tool. It’s a metal ring with a pointed tip that extends her finger into a claw. At first, the sharp sensation kept my back tense, but it soon relaxed to the sensation, as if my body was remembering the scar on my back from childhood. Then she started brushing her hair, the barbs of the brush echoing the scratching sound from earlier.
I wondered why I stopped following the habit of brushing my hair. When I do it, it feels like a chore to get done in a hurry, but when Luther does it, it feels like a simple moment of self-care. Finally, she had me turn over to trace the face and used a feather attached to a delicate wand to do it.
Unlike other chiropractic treatments I have received, there was no so-called “work” required. There was no pore removal or deep tissue pressure that forced painful breathing. In the purest sense of the word, this was truly amazing. Pure joy, like eating ice cream or soaking in a warm bath. I scratched an itch I didn’t even realize I had (just kidding).
When Luther whispered, “It’s over,” I realized I had made a mistake in choosing a 20-minute session. I was focused on the feeling I had as a child, of being cared for, but I wasn’t ready to surface and go home yet.
Julie Luther uses a variety of props to give a light touch massage. Her most popular are the pointed metal rings that extend onto the fingers into claws.
When I spoke to Luther afterwards, she laughed knowingly when I admitted my initial hesitation. As it turns out, this 20-minute session was designed precisely for nervous beginners like me. Often clients will come back for longer next time or even request more time directly from the table.
“A lot of times we get asked, ‘Is there room to extend the session?'” Luther said. “Sometimes I do.”
Next time I would like to book Grandma and spend 80 minutes worth of wonderful time. Touch may be all you need, if your body can benefit from a proper facial or massage. Our bodies don’t necessarily need to do the work to feel good. I just want you to remember what it feels like to be cared for.
