Heated eyeballs, inflatable body armour and ‘simultaneous pleasure and torment’: is this the future of relaxation? - The Guardian

[Alyx Gorman]

“Please close your eyes, relax and enjoy,” I am instructed in a robotic American accent just before the loud mechanical whirrings commence. Next to me in bed, not for the first time, my husband complains it sounds awful.

I feel bad for him, but not too bad. I am too busy closing my eyes, relaxing and enjoying “air pressure plus heat” rolling and pulsating over my orbital bones. For the next 15 minutes I am subjected to simultaneous sensations of pleasure and torment: industrial fan sounds right against my ears, waves of heat and pressure right across my eyes. I melt into my pillow as the goggles hit my sore spot, pinching my left brow right where it wrinkles due to mild astigmatism. For the past few weeks, I have been doing this every night before sleep. But I am beginning to worry that my new toy, a Renpho eye massager, might send me blind.

When I show the device to Dr Peter Sumich, an ophthalmologist and eye surgeon, at a Sydney cafe, he tells me this fear is a touch overblown. But, he cautions: “I don’t like anything that vibrates the eye.” He explains that the human eyeball is basically jelly, before showing me some fMRI scans of people gently rubbing their eyes. Internally this action looks as violent as the eye scene in a Clockwork Orange.

Sumich says while massaging the muscles around your eyes is fine, and even a good thing, direct rubbing or vibration on the eye itself “can potentially damage your retina”.

Fortunately, I find the vibrate function on the eye massager physically unpleasant, so it is no huge loss to avoid it.

I show Sumich the list of claims the eye massager is sold with. “Relieve headache and eye strain – well that’s a bit of a vague claim, isn’t it?” he says.

“Alleviate eye puffiness, dry eye and migraine. Helps reduce dark circles? I don’t see how it’d do that.

“Soothes tired eyes? Well, stroking a kitten can soothe your tired eyes. They’re well-designed claims because they’re not specific, you know what I mean?”

I acquired my eye massager on sale after a friend showed me hers. She described the device as a form of meditation, without actually having to meditate. My friend was right. The goggles do induce a profound awareness of the present moment: when something hot is pulsing against your face, it’s hard to think about anything else.

I’m not alone in turning to small consumer electronics in order to relax. The hashtag #eyemassager has accumulated over 20,000 mentions on TikTok, with the most-viewed videos showing my device or other, similar products.

“Generally speaking, the reason people have trouble with their eyes is because of dryness,” Sumich says. “And the biggest cause of dryness across the board is digital eye syndrome, which is just that we spend too long on our computers.” When Sumich says my screen time makes me “a perfect target demographic” for a device like the one he is holding, I feel a bit too seen.

Eye massagers are just one iteration in the rapidly expanding category of personal massage devices. You can also buy massage devices tailored to your head, shoulders, knees and toes (well, feet) as well. Some use air pressure and resemble the postsurgical boots designed to prevent deep vein thrombosis in hospitals (because they’re basically the same thing); some use vibration; and others look like power drills and promise to relieve muscle aches with intense percussion.

On top of their massaging capabilities, many of these devices also use heat. Sumich suspects heat – and the fact I have to close my eyes to use it – is the secret sauce in my device. “If you had a bath and put a hot washer over your eyes and lay there for 15 minutes, relax and add a glass of wine, perhaps it would do all the same things.”

Perth physiotherapist Kieran Richardson agrees that heat alone has the power to relax. He says “the real sceptic’s view” on massage devices would be, “you could arguably just use a heat pack and get a similar outcome”.

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That isn’t his view though. Richardson says these devices have their place, and that place is in short-termpain relief. “It might be 24 to 48 hours after using it. The patients or the clients will have benefit, but it doesn’t seem to be a long-lasting thing.”

Sometimes the pain being relieved belongs to the massage therapist, as well as the client. Richardson says some of his colleagues also use devices, particularly percussive massage guns.

In Australia, the Rolls-Royce of massage machines is the Boa. Designed primarily for clinical practices, it can perform a low-pressure but physically gruelling style of massage called lymphatic drainage. In a traditional lymphatic drainage massage, a therapist will manually move lymph fluid around a client’s body using a highly repetitive brushing motion. The Boa, which resembles the heavily padded uniform of an ice hockey goaltender, squeezes it around instead.

The machine’s Australian distributor, Anna Davies, tells me many of her clients are massage or physiotherapists who “just need a little bit of a break in between clients”. While she says nothing will ever replace hands-on touch, rubbing human flesh for hours on end is “obviously very tolling” on the body.

Although Davies’ Boa customers have mostly been wellness centres, she has sold three of them – at $22,000 a piece – for home use.

Unlike many massage devices, the Boa is not electrically heated. It doesn’t need to be. Inside an inflatable space suit, body heat alone is more than enough. Although the device has a top and bottom, they are only meant to be used separately. Davies says it would be too intense to have both going at once. Sweating, while perched on a stool wearing the whole kit anyway, I quietly decide this is true, even when the machine is not plugged in.

When I take the top half of the suit off to actually try the Boa out, it feels at first as though I am stepping into a pool of viscous liquid. Beginning at my feet, air fills the device’s 24 algorithmically controlled chambers, slowly compressing me as it swells up to my lower torso.

The “Boa” name is no misnomer. This machine can squeeze. I am trying it on “sports massage”, since Davies says this setting is the most intense. The pressure it exerts on my waist feels as though I am being tight-laced into a corset. It stretches my lower body out as it compresses, gently tugging my ankle and knee joints away from each other, resulting in a few satisfying pops.

The Boa both does and does not feel like a massage. One sensation is comparable to a forearm being dragged slowly up my calf. When the machine applies a soothing grip to my perpetually aching arches, it could almost be a human’s hand. But a human does not squeeze your whole body at once. And a human certainly doesn’t make the same sound as a bouncing castle inflating.

I ask Davies if the noise is a problem for people. She says some people do mention it. Fan-forced volume aside, when I’m finished with my 20-minute session, I do feel quite relaxed. This is impressive given I used it while lying on the floor of a windowed meeting room, in an open-plan office, while also having my photograph taken.

Actually buying a Boa is well beyond my means, but using one at a clinic or spa tends to be slightly cheaper than spending the same amount of time with a qualified massage therapist. For this reason, I could see myself trying it again.

In July of this year, the Boa became one of only 38 massage products to be licensed as a medical device by the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods. Davies says the process was fairly straightforward, since the Boa had already attained comparable licensing in Europe. Since gaining TGA approval, Davies has seen a significant increase in inquiries about the device.

In Australia, medical devices have to meet specific requirements around safety, labelling and clinical evidence to support any therapeutic claims they might make.

Although the TGA say mechanical massage products that make specific claims around treating or alleviating a disease or injury could be considered medical devices – and regulated accordingly – many of these products, my eye massager included, seem to fall into a health claim grey zone. Any product can claim to relax, release or soothe; but achieving long-term reductions in pain is a different story.

While a massager might seem relatively innocuous, Richardson says people who are older and have vascular concerns should consult with their GP before trying one out, particularly the more percussive varieties. “For sure there would be scenarios where it would be risky to use it,” he says.

There is also the fact that any new source of pain or discomfort is probably your body’s way of telling you there’s something wrong. Wanting a new toy is likely neither the cause, nor the solution, to what ails you – and a human with medical qualifications will do a better job than a machine at diagnosing and treating it.

“There’s very serious conditions that can come with pain,” Richardson says. “You always want to be getting someone to look at that first.”

Given a healthcare professional has already identified my issue – a critical deficiency of chill – I’ll continue to use my eye massager at night. But probably on the “heat only” setting.