Unfortunately I have to update my review to reflect my past few visits. I asked for Gina this time based on other reviews that said she focused well on their problem areas.
This was sadly not my experience... I'm not sure what the little paper given at the beginning is supposed to be for, because most of the masseuses seem to treat the areas circled as "don't touch" rather than "focus on." This has happened to me multiple times at My Beauty Spa, where the areas I've asked for have remained untouched (especially the hands. I work with my hands and desperately need hand massage). The only masseuses so far who have given me a good massage here are Anna (no longer listed as an employee) and Linda or Judy (one did my massage and one did my partner's, I cannot remember which). I've now had poor experiences with 3 other masseuses here.
I've attached an image -- circled in green are the areas I asked for focus, and circled in orange are the areas I was massaged. I got a 90 minute massage today and of the 90 minutes, about 1-2 minutes total was spent on my hands, less than 10 minutes on my neck/jaw/traps, and the area of glutes I circles was just glided over. I instead got about 30 minutes straight of shoulder blade scraping with elbow, 10 mins per side scraping my outer thighs, 25 mins on calves and feet. About 90% of the massage was done with elbows and knuckles, hardly any finger pressure was done -- I understand this technique is used to avoid hand strain, but it should not be so imbalanced. I can take very deep pressure and this massage hurt me, because she was using bone over bone. You should not use the elbow and forearm bone, or knuckles, to massage over bones and joints. Bone on bone is painful. She also randomly turned on the light and left the room without saying anything, I assume to gather some supplies, but it would be courteous to mention.
I left my massage in more pain than when I came in. When I told the receptionist at checkout and showed her what was actually massaged on the map, no resolution was offered. She just turned the checkout screen with the $115 total toward me, and said next time I can just tell them at the front desk again to make sure the masseuse does the circled areas. Isn't that what I already did though? Why did I even fill out the paper at all if you are not giving it to the masseuse to focus on the areas circled? I never saw my paper hung on the door of my room or sitting in the room at all before or after the massage, though other rooms did have papers hung on the door mine did not.
I paid in cash as well -- the cash discount was not honored, and no concession was offered for my pain upon leaving or for the complete lack of focus on my problem areas. I'm in a lot of pain now and even more tense than before in the problem areas, and extremely stressed out.
I needed this massage desperately due to stress, chronic pain, and burnout. Now I have to wait for what they've done to heal and pay again for someone else to fix me, as I'm so incredibly tense. Whatever she did on my shoulder blades made the pain in my neck and trapezius much worse. I'm really sad and disappointed. I just paid $125 with tip (normally I'd tip more if it was well done) to get worse, essentially. I'm sitting here rubbing my sore neck and shoulders in my car and crying from the stress.
This isn't even considering a previous time I came in for massage and the masseuse (Fion) was literally on her phone the first 15 minutes and barely massaging me with one hand. That time, I just walked out because it was so ridiculous. Unfortunately I don't find My Beauty Spa a reliable place for massage anymore which is sad because when Anna was there I would come every other week. read more