My First Hammam Experience: Another Soap Story

This past Sunday, I was fortunate enough to be invited to the hammam with my lunch host mom from Sale and her “6-year-old” daughter (I am convinced that she is 3 or 4), and her neighbor/my best Moroccan friend Khoula.

The hammam is extremely difficult to describe, so I’ll walk you through it step by step.

1. Enter the hammam building (make sure it’s female-only, not male-only) and pay the fee. It was 13 dirhams ($1.3ish) each for us, but my lunch host mom paid even though we begged her not to. This was a very generous thing for her family to do.

2. Take off all your clothing except your underwear. Even your bra. (This part was weird for me and Chloe at first… we kept hugging ourselves to hide, but finally gave in when we saw that the rest of the women there were very confident and comfortable).

3. Pay a lady at the front desk to watch your clothing while you ~hammam~.

Collect your toiletry items and go on in! Toiletry items include a bucket, a ladle/smaller bucket, a brown liquid soap that’s super oily, normal body wash/bar soap, a hair brush, shampoo and conditioner, and a qis.

I LOVE QIS’s. They are essentially mittens (minus the thumb part) made of varying levels of rough fabric. I once bought a cheap one at a hanout (hanout = small snack shop) and it was not very rough and ripped super easily because you’re meant to scrub HARD in hammams. Then I upgraded to a stiff, sandpaper-like one, and the strongest are basically scratchy mitten rocks.

Qis’s are used for scrubbing all of the dead skin off your body. I didn’t even think I had dead skin until I started scrubbing, and man was it gross when it started coming off. For this reason, nobody is supposed to share a qis because why on earth would you want somebody else’s dead skin on you?

Anyways…

4. Put the oily, brown soap all over your body and once it’s spread everywhere, use the qis to scrub scrub scrub. It is not abnormal to qis your face, either, although you have to be careful not to hurt your skin. All my nose blackheads (yum, thanks Madeleine!) completely disappeared, and my face was hella soft after. As was the rest of my skin.

I’ve heard stories of host moms scrubbing their American children raw (my lunch host sister was scrubbed until she cried), but luckily I was allowed to scrub myself and was a tad gentler.

5. Fill the bucket with boiling hot water (this is the Moroccan norm, although I found the hammam itself so hot that I used freezing water) and ladle the water over your body to rinse off the dead skin.

6. Once you’re all scrubbed (this whole process takes 30-60 minutes), you relax a little, then rub some normal soap onto your fresh new skin. You can also wash your hair, condition it, brush it out, whatever you want. You will continue to ladle the water over your body, rinsing off the soap.

7. That’s kinda it! You’re all clean, exhausted from the heat of the hammam, and ready to towel off, get dressed and go home for a nap.

Other hammam things:

There are 3 rooms in every hammam: one is FREAKING HOT, one is medium hot, and one is just hot. I was in the “just hot” one and still had to use freezing cold water to wash, and constantly drink from my water bottle.

The rooms are completely tiled. The entire floor, the benches, the walls, and the ceilings. This leads to a lot of condensation buildup on the ceilings, which drips down pretty often.

There are at least two faucets in each hammam room: one for freezing cold water, and one for hot water.

Women often scrub each other’s backs because they are difficult to reach. It is a crazy bonding experience.

Some people like going from room to room, changing temperatures multiple times throughout their 1-2 hour hammam experience. I haven’t received a real answer for why this happens, but I assume you go in the hottest room while you’re qis’ing so your pores are super open for scrubbing? But who knows.

When leaving the hammam (or going outside with wet hair at any time), it is expected that you cover your hair.

Here are the reasons that I have received from various people:

So you don’t catch a cold.

It’s just a cultural thing with no real reason.

Because it’s normal to shower after sex, so if you have wet hair then you definitely just had sex and are showing it off because you’re a whore.

It’s also expected that you change your clothes after going in the hammam because the clothes that you entered with are dirty, and now you’re completely clean.

WEAR PLASTIC SANDALS INSIDE THE HAMMAM!!! There is nothing grosser than stepping in somebody else’s dead skin.

All in all, the hammam was an amazing experience, I was honored that my lunch host mom invited me, and I was EXTREMELY clean after.