Wendy Warburton, deputy editor of Style Weekly, writes in the Ottawa Citizen that food is big business at spas, including:

Fruit cocktail facial
Parsley and cucumber eye treatment
Chocolate and roses pedicure
Grape crush exfoliation
Nutty cream body scrub with cognac
Cherry body massage for 2
Vanilla honey chocolate hydrotherapy

Oresta Korbutiak, owner of Oresta Organics on O’Connor Street, whose facial offerings include Chocolate Decadence and Yam & Pumpkin Enzyme Peel, said,

"I was blown away by the results I could get from using food-based ingredients. I get better results from food-based products than I did from the chemical lines I used before."

Joe Schwarcz, a chemistry prof at McGill said,

"There’s no magical ingredient that can get rid of (body fat) save for liposuction. The only thing you can do when you rub something on it is affect the surface of the skin. Moisturizing creams will do that. They leave behind a layer of essentially fatty material that prevents water inside the skin from evaporating. Whether you’re using Crisco or Vaseline or La Prairie’s $500 cream, you’re getting the same effect. …

"If you’re looking at an AHA, like lactic acid, what is the difference if you’re making that in the lab or if you extract it from sour milk? What defines a substance is its molecular structure, not its ancestry. One of the biggest myths out there is that somehow natural substances are better than synthetic. Nature isn’t benign."