Steam Room Magazine - Bathroom Design Hearts Steam Showers
Steam: The Magazine: Custom Steam Rooms, Steam Showers, & Health. Learn More About Building Your Own Steam Shower Enclosure, Aromatherapy, Water Proofing & Installing a Steam Generator. Read Steam Shower Reviews. Your One Stop Shop to Getting a Steam Shower In Your Own Home.Built-in Steam Shower
Walk-in Steam Shower
This is a prefabricated, built-in steam shower. We are waiting to see one in person, but the concept is great. It’s essentially a pre-built steam shower room that has the look and feel of a custom tiled in steam shower. This unit is available at www.steamroom.net and is manufactured by Wasauna.
Custom Steam Room Photos
Here are 5 pictures of stylish & modern custom steam rooms.
Unique all glass steam room
Custom Steam Room with Ivy
Custom Steam Shower
Shower Panels for Steam Rooms
If you are building a custom steam shower, you have hundreds of choices to make: faucets, showerheads, valves, jets, control panels, tile, and much more. One way to simplify everything is to use a shower panel. You will still need to install a steam generator and tile in the shower, but everything else will be taken care of by the shower panel. Modern shower panels offer hydromassage shower jets, overhead rain showers, seats, stereo sound, iPod connectivity, and many other features. They are typically built from aluminum or acrylic.
Toto Steam Rooms
We’ve had quite a few readers ask us if Toto offers any steam rooms. Unfortunately, Toto does not currently offer a steam generator or a steam shower kit. However, they do offer a variety of showerheads, valves, thermostatic mixers, and other high quality shower accessories. If you are interested in building a custom steam room with Toto components, you can do it. You’ll just have to buy the steam generator and control panel from another company, but you can get everything else from Toto. Here is a picture of their Soiree Shower Room:
Steam Benefits, Studies & General Information
If you are more interested in steam than in steam showers and bathrooms, or you are interested in adding a steam room to your house but aren’t sure exactly what steam is, check out our new article on steam: www.mysteamroom.com/steam-studies
eBay Steam Shower Reviews
People keep asking me to review steam showers on eBay. Well, I’m not going to do it. Not for now anyway. I just don’t have enough information, because there are so many sellers. The only thing I would advise, if you are buying a steam shower on eBay, is this: don’t look at the feedback percentage alone. Sellers know how to remove negative feedbacks from their ratings, but the comments stay. They also have tricks like buying tons of $.30 cent items to improve their feedback. Read the last 200 or so steam shower feedback reviews. Make sure that customers aren’t angry with shiptimes, support, or the overall quality of the unit. If a seller on eBay does give you a hard time, be sure to leave them a negative feedback. It’s a great service to other buyers, and more importantly, once you leave the negative the seller will do just about anything to get you to remove it.
Jacuzzi Omega Morphosis Steam Showers
If you can’t view this image all the way, click on it or go to the product page here: http://www.jacuzzi-morphosis.com/english/pininfarina/omega.html.
I am a natural cynic and the first thing I thought was “is the ultra-modern chair really necessary?” But the more I looked at the shower, the more I liked it. I’m assuming that since it’s made by Jacuzzi it is high quality in every way. But since it is Jacuzzi, it’s hard to get any real information from the website. The shower is made from Blackstone (the walls) and tempered glass. I’m looking forward to feeling and touching the walls, because I’m a bit skeptical that this is a strong sturdy shower, and the site is somewhat vague about what support materials are used and how thick the shower walls are. The steam room runs off 220 power (very good) and is 89 inches high (good). Jaccuzi is marketing the shower as “Increasingly more avant-garde to the utmost degree. Minimalist yet livable,” which is frankly nonsense and I don’t see how this encourages anyone to want to buy the shower. In my opinion, the bathroom & steam shower industry could use a little less hyperbole and a little more reality. Until I touch one next month, I will holdoff on recommending this unit, especially as it has a pricetag of $20,000.
Why Steam Showers Clean Out Your Pores
It’s all about wet heat. When you are exercising outdoors or trying to detoxify yourself in a sauna, chances are you are in an environment with 0-40% hummidity. This means some or all of the water on your skin immediately evaporates. Water evaporating causes a chemical reaction that ultimately creates a cooling effect. This is the true purpose of sweating — to cool off the body. And sweating works very effectively, but it’s purpose isn’t to clear out your pores. When sweating creates a cooling effect near your body, your pores shrink, even if you are still overheating. When your pores are smaller, sebum (the gunk that comes out of your pores) tends to clog up and get stuck. There are other reasons your body can produce excess sebum - a change in eating habits, chemicals in the water or air, hormonal changes induced by working out or aging. Cleaning out your pores is about opening them up and keeping them wide open. If your pores stay wide open for about 15-20 minutes, the combination of steam, sweat, and the open pores will induce the sebum to flow out.
When you use a steam room, you are in a hot environment with 100% hummidity. Your body reactions to the 100% hummidity by opening up the pores and sweating profusely, but the body isn’t designed to live in an environment with 100% hummidity. The body evolved in the African desert, an environment that typically has 20-30% hummidity. When your body sweats and the sweat can’t evaporate (in 100% hummidity, water cannot evaporate because there is no room for it in the air), there is no cooling effect. The body reacts to this by opening up the pores and sweating more and more. Instead of cooling off, the pores stay open, sebum and other gunk, toxins, and polutants flow out, and your skin becomes clear. It’s not an overnight process - in general, you need to steam about 5-10 times to notice real effects. But the benefits are real, there is no doubt. Take a look in the mirror after your first session of steaming and you will see the sebum coming out of your pores. Excess sebum clogged in the pores causes acne, rough skin, and discolored skin. Many people deal with this by taking unnecessary oral anti-biotics, or using harsh creams on the skin. These creams (Retin-A, Benzyl Peroxide, Glycolic Acid, among others) turn your skin red, cause free radicals that age your skin, and worse.
This might beat acne, but it’s a far worse solution than sitting in a steam room for 3 times a week and watching your skin turn naturally beautiful without any chemicals or anti-biotics.
To summarize, steaming is all about the wet heat. When you hop in a steam shower, your body sweats profusely but cannot cool itself off. After about 20 minutes, wide open pores will have excreted a bunch of junk that makes your skin look worse.
Why Do You Steam?
An ongoing feature of steam room magazine is an interview with various individuals about why they steam.
I asked Stacy, a 29 year old woman who works out at my gym, why she steams.
“Stress relief.” she said first - “it helps me detox from Ambien and Xanax. When I was anxious and depressed I steamed every day. It made me feel more normal. Balanced. Rejuvinated.”
Next, I asked Jon, another gym member. “Allergy relief and skin,” he said, “I feel a sense of renewal and feel cleansed after 15 minutes.
Albert is a person I have known for a few years who actually goes to the gym to steam more often than he goes to work out. “I steam because it’s a stress relief, it opens the pores, and it helps me lose weight. Especially immediately before I weigh myself.” said Al.
Angelina was the 4th person I asked about steam. I saw her headed into the steam room area of the gym, so I assumed that she did steam. But she said that she doesn’t steam because “I don’t like to sweat.”
Next, I asked Lance, a friend who talks about steam at least once a day, why he steams. “I haven’t had a cold or been sick since I started steaming. It’s been years. I guess you’d call that detoxification. Destress. Increased cardio activity. My skin looks much better (to me, anyway).” He said.
I found it interesting that people who don’t steam are a bit skeptical about the activity, but people who do it on a regular basis love it and legitimately believe that it helps them with one problem or another.
Royal Steam Shower
Want to live like a king? Build a steam shower like this one in your house.
It’s not as hard as it looks. This shower is made from alternating black and white bathroom tile, a few Kohler Showerheads (which are certainly expensive, but you can easily buy cheaper showerheads that look exactly the same), a Kohler Steam Generator and Control Panel, and some simple Body Sprays. Designing the piping system behind the shower and combining it with the control panel certainly takes some work, but it’s not rocket science. Rather than spend a fortune on a high end custom bathroom remodeler, my recommendation is finding a picture of a bathroom you like, identifying the exact components that you want, and finding some cheap but skilled laborers on craigslist. There is nothing in this picture that requires an expert. Connecting electricity to the control panel requires a licensed electrician, but it will only take him 15 minutes. Even if you have to spend two hours with him, that’s only $150. You can find an eager-to-work guy with plumbing skills on craigslist for $20, who can easily connect all the pipes to the various body sprays. I do recommend using a professional to lay down the floor and wall tile, but that only costs $4 per square foot, even for a top company. One thing to be certain: spend a lot of time testing to make sure the tile is absolutely waterproof. If you end up with a leak, you could get mold below your shower that you’ll never get out.
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