The Finnish word for the burst of steam that rises when you pour water on hot stones is löyly. It's worth knowing that the word originally meant spirit, breath, soul — it's cognate with the Hungarian lélek, meaning soul, and the Mansi läl, meaning life (Wikipedia). Which tells you something about how the Finns think about a bucket of water. It isn't an accessory. It's the point. Everything sold in the sauna accessories aisle is either serving that moment or distracting from i

Somewhere between deciding you want a sauna and actually sitting in one, there's a wall you hit. It's the heater aisle, and it's a strange place. You'll find a beautifully photographed Estonian stove for $6,400. You'll find something on Amazon for $576 that looks close enough. And you'll find no obvious reason why one costs eleven times the other. I went and priced the whole Canadian market to figure out where the real line is. It turns out the answer isn't complicated, but i

The sauna has spent most of its history as a cultural ritual rather than a health intervention. In Finland — where there are more saunas than cars — sitting in a 200°F wooden room a few times a week is simply what you do. But over the last decade, a long-running Finnish research cohort has turned that ritual into one of the more interesting datasets in preventive health, and the numbers are hard to ignore. Here's what the evidence says, where it's strong, where it's shaky, an