Designing your downtime
A chat with Estée Lalonde on the healing powers of the bath.
If I cast my mind back, I think the first time I came across
was around 2012. I would watch her videos on beauty and life, and loved how she seemed so like herself — she knew what she liked and what she didn’t, she was honest and authentic, and it always felt like watching a friend.
Since then, she and her work have shifted and evolved with new life stages and circumstances, but one thing I notice that has remained a constant is her undying love of the bath. So that’s what we talk about in this chat — where her love for the tub came from, how it has changed, and her brand Mirror Water that celebrates the act of designing your downtime.
It’s a conversation peppered with wisdom and advice for using the bath as a space to process, heal, and come home to yourself, and I left it feeling very inspired for my next soak.
Where I start with everyone is by asking who they are without saying what their job is.
That’s a tough question because my life is my job and my job is my life, but I guess I would say my name is Estée Lalonde, I live in London, and I’ve lived in London for 15 years. I’m originally from Canada and I have a doggy, she’s my everything, her name is Effie, and she’s a rescue from Greece, she just walked through the door just now. I’m newly engaged, getting married this summer. What else can I tell you that has nothing to do with my job? I like stretching, I love baths, I love any form of rest and relaxation, even though I never get any of it, and I love food.
Perfect! It’s always such a struggle to do that. People always automatically say what their job is and the essence of who you are is actually so much more than that. Anyway, now you can say what you do.
That is really hard and I’ve never been asked to do that before. Well, in therapy I have, and it’s actually really difficult for me because it’s so intertwined, but my job has changed a lot over the years. Now I would call myself a founder, first more than anything else. I launched my wellness brand Mirror Water a bit over two years ago, so that’s what my main focus has been for about 4 years now.
I’m also a content creator and that’s how I have spent my 15-year career — sharing my life online and sharing beauty and wellness tips and tricks and all of that stuff. I also have a jewellery collaboration. Anything creative, I love creative things and I just see where the wind takes me, but I guess at the core of it it’s community building.
I would definitely say that feels like a really important part of what you do. But also, if I play a word association game with the name Estée Lalonde, the first thing that comes to my mind is “Baths”.
Yay!
So I’d love to talk about baths and why they are so important to you, how they became so important to you and the role that they’ve played in your life as somebody who loves relaxation but doesn’t get enough of it.
The thing that’s weird with baths is that I didn’t actually take a lot of baths as a teenager or even as a child. It’s not something my mum ever did, my mum hates baths, she thinks it’s like soaking in your own filth, which always makes me think, how dirty are you? So I didn’t grow up witnessing the ritual of it or anything like that, and to be honest, I never lived in a place that had a nice bathtub. Growing up in a small house, we all shared this one tiny bathroom, and it just wasn’t a place where people were taking baths.
So, bathing was really something that I discovered when I moved to London, and it was sort of like a desperate attempt at helping myself feel better about things like homesickness, my depression, my anxiety. I had always had depression and anxiety, even as a teenager, but when I moved to London I was particularly lonely and desperate to self-soothe, basically, and baths are so soothing. People compare it to being in your mother’s womb and water is so healing, and all of that, but there is something about the heat and the temperature, and I just fell in love with them.
It became instantly this thing of thinking “I need a bath” and it would help me release a bit of the pressure that was going on in my life at the time. It also felt like a really safe space for me to cry, which is a bit sad to think back on. I could just lock the door and I knew no one was around and I could just be my most pure self in the bath. You’re literally naked, staring at your jiggly body, and it’s always kind of a shocker to look down and see yourself just floating in there, it can be really confronting, physically and emotionally, and it just became something that I really leaned on in my self-care practice. I’ve never been someone that’s gone to the gym, I don’t enjoy being social, I’m very introverted, and it just became sort of like my sport, in a way.
I’ve changed a lot now, but that was sort of where I was back then. Being depressed, sometimes you don’t have the energy to do physical things and sometimes even having a shower or a bath is all you can muster the strength to do, and that was where I was at that time. And now I feel a lot stronger mentally and it’s still something that I enjoy so much. It’s less of a lifesaver, even though sometimes it feels like a lifesaver, and more of something I truly enjoy.
That was a really beautiful, in-depth, and honest answer. You could have said something so surface but that really went to the root of it!
I am very passionate about it.
I’m so glad! So, do you now have more positive associations with baths? When did the transition happen between it being something that you had to do to something more for pleasure?
Well, I think we’ve all seen the films where the girl’s gone through the break-up and she’s in the bathtub with the glass of wine, and I’ve been there, of course, and it’s definitely still the place I go when I’m struggling, but it’s honestly like washing my hair now, it’s something I do every single week as part of my routine. It’s like yoga, I just do it now.
I guess it sort of started to change when was around maybe 28. I moved into my first apartment as a newly single lady, and I had this amazing bathtub and it’s really where I healed myself, I really believe I healed myself in that bathtub. Funnily enough, I’m renting that flat to a friend and she said that she healed herself in that bathtub as well, so I feel like it’s a very healing tub.
But as I started healing myself, I started to love myself, and I’m not saying it only happened in the bathtub, but that was the phase of my life that I was going through, trying to rebuild myself and becoming the woman that I am today and I just associate all of those moments as things I did to prioritise myself.
It was especially in that time, around 28 to 30 when I was putting on my favourite music, burning my favourite incense, and putting the dim mood lighting on exactly how I wanted it, I lived by myself, I ate whatever food I wanted, I went to bed at whatever time I wanted, all of those things were just rebuilding myself, so that’s when my positive association started.
Now I’m in a very different part of my life — newly engaged, I live with my fiancé, we have a dog together, we both work full-time, it’s not as easy to be so indulgent about it. Now I really have to block out the time, so for instance, I have a flight tomorrow morning and I have to leave at 10 o’clock in the morning. I will be waking up early so that I can have a morning bath before my flight, to kind of set myself up for success. I love morning baths and that’s not something I ever really used to do before, and I seriously want to give a shout-out to morning baths because baths don’t just need to happen on a Sunday night.
So yeah, it’s more about consciously booking out the time for myself and people can book time in for themselves however they want. At Mirror Water our little catchphrase is “design your downtime” — just like you would schedule in meetings, you schedule in your downtime. That’s what I do with my baths now.
Have you heard of the philosopher Byung Chul Han?
No.
He’s this amazing South Korean philosopher living in Germany and he has this book called The Disappearance of Rituals where he talks about how important rituals are in people’s lives. He has this great quote saying how rituals are “symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world”, and what you were just saying about designing your downtime, and really being super conscious and intentional about it, to make your world exactly what you want it to be, really connected with that quote for me.
I’ve written that down and I’m going to get that book on my Kindle. I guess, not to jump ahead, but the name Mirror Water is all about self-reflection and paying more attention to your inner world, so that idea of feeling at home within yourself, like you were just saying, it’s exactly what it’s all about for me. I know it’s quite cheesy to be like “You’re home anywhere you go”, but so many of us are out of touch with our inner worlds, just due to technology and our schedules and everything. When I have a bath it really truly does feel like I am coming home to myself in some way, and perhaps it’s the ritualistic element of it with the water, but I guess it’s the same for people who run — they are making that choice for themselves and it’s a time to process, however you like to do that.
So, with Mirror Water, I never want it to be too prescriptive, I never want “self-care” to feel like another thing on your to-do list. I really want it to feel like something that you want to do, that you prioritise in that way of “this is for me”, rather than feeling that you need to do 500 sit-ups, and do this and drink that and take those supplements.
I just want it to reframe self-care a little bit because there is so much guilt associated with the self-care world where you feel like you’re never doing enough to make yourself feel better, which makes you feel worse about yourself, and it’s this vicious self-care cycle.
I also feel like self-care gets very stuck in a capitalistic rut. Whereas a bath can be totally free — apart from the hot water cost.
Yes!
It can be completely free just getting into a tub of hot water, and then you can add any accoutrements onto it if you want that make it better, but I think taking a bath is one of those things where, if you don’t have any money to spend on bits and pieces, you can just draw a bath, putting on some nice music, and hey presto you’ve got an amazing experience.
Completely! And obviously, the best things in life are free, right, so yes I’m selling bath and body care products, but it’s almost the way I look at gym wear. I love buying a new outfit to wear to the gym class because it makes me go do the thing. I am more likely to go to that pilates class if I feel good in my clothes, and it’s a similar way that I look at things with baths, they are things that help me enjoy it more.
It enhances. It’s not the foundation of the ritual, it enhances the ritual.
Exactly.
So for people who are a bit like your mum — the total opposite of my mum who is obsessed with baths, she takes one every day — how do you massage the idea of baths?
I don’t think my mum will ever have a bath — she’s repulsed by hot tubs, she will never go in a public pool, she literally hates it, but that’s why we’ve got our body oil, so she can get a little piece of that ritual instead of having a bath.
But you know, showers are amazing too. I can’t say that I like one more than the other because I shower every day and sometimes the shower is just so good. A hot shower.
Chef’s kiss. I actually think it has more to do with water — water has such a power to it. Even in the cities where it’s filled with calcium and chlorine and whatever, the feeling of it on your body is just so amazing. And it only gets better when you’re out in nature. Do you get into all the cold plunges and things like that?
No, I don’t, I hate being cold. But when I go to the beach, I can just look at the waves crashing for hours, it’s so mesmerising, like fire. What is so soothing about that? Obviously, the waves and the moon and I don’t know all the science behind it, but it’s all very interconnected.
When I was a kid growing up in Canada, we always used to play in the creeks with the little fish. I really did grow up around trees and water and I had a lot of alone time. It was very normal for me and my brother to hang out in the forest all afternoon, that was just a thing we did in Canada, so I really wanted to bring that element of nature into things because living in the city is so stressful and quite unnatural. Even though I love it, I think it’s so important to get that reprieve wherever you can.
Yes definitely. Do you have any final pieces of bath-related wisdom you would like to share?
There is this one thing I can say that a reiki healer taught me and I tell everyone this whenever I can.
When you’re in the bath and you’ve decided it’s time to let go of something, spend the time in the bath processing, hold a mirror up to your day or your week or your life or a situation, and when you’re ready to get out, unplug the water but lay in the bath and let the water drain while you’re still in the bathtub.
I guess it’s gravitational, but the water goes down and you can feel a heaviness move down and be released, and it’s all about visualising the negativity going down the drain. I mean, you are kind of laying there like a cold, dead fish, but there is something about that physical experience with the visualisation that means that when you get out of the bath you feel mentally lighter. I always try to tell people that, so you should try that next time you’re in there. And tell your mum!
I will, that sounds beautiful and also makes sense because it’s quite cleansing with the water moving across your body, rather than soaking in a stagnant body of water. That’s a great tip.
And another thing I’ll say, which my mum always says to me, is that if you’ve got a situation in your life and you feel like you’re going to die if you don’t figure something out, have a bath or a shower and things are always going to feel different afterwards.
They really, really do. Sometimes I’m feeling shit and I’ll think, oh god, I guess I’ll just have a bath, and I always come out feeling better. I don’t know why. I don’t know if it’s energy shifting or nervous system regulation, but I literally always feel better even if the situation hasn’t changed. And for someone who has anxiety, it’s just such a great tool to have.
Recommendations from Estée, patron saint of the tub.
SOAK Bath Salts from Mirror Water, obviously.
Earl of East Incense Cones.
A Wonderboom speaker to play your music.
Healing is a Miracle by Julianna Barwick.
Thanks so much for being here and I’ll see you in the next one,
Annabel
Baths are Magic. Every home should have one. Baths and silent walks in a forest are pure therapy.
So cool that you got to chat with Estee! I have been following her journey for a couple of years now and am still dying to try out the Mirror Water products. Did you do a video interview or did you sent over your questions?