AT Club Prana in the Hyatt Regency Bombay, which in Sanskrit means �life force�, is a wonderful beauty therapist and doctor in naturopathy who treats every guest, every client, every patient with the most natural products on earth. She uses fruits, vegetables, plants, herbs, cereals, food grains, milk... anything that appeals to her senses, and everything that can be eaten, in her line of work. Nirmala Shetty, who is a cheerful, dusky and attractive woman, says in a soothing manner: �Why use preservatives, when you can use the product neat!�

She explains her fundamentals simply: �If you�ve got to take Vitamin C for the skin, why pop a pill? Why not eat the orange itself or apply it to your skin? Remember Cleopatra? It was said she used to bathe in asses milk. Now milk is certainly a good cleanser. But not the commercially available cleansing milk. You won�t find a pinch of milk in that! Instead, you will find chemicals. Yogurt has enzymes that suit most people. So use buttermilk as a sun-tan lotion. It will take care of the tan and create an acid mantle on the skin that will prevent a bacterial attack!�

And she has in her small kitchen-cum-workshop at Club Prana�s spa and fitness centre, all the fruits and veggies necessary for beauty treatment that could go into any of the Hyatt Regency�s restaurant menus. She offers all of them for sample and tasting! Almond packs; cleanser packs made of green gram, masoor dal, turmeric powder, milk and honey; astringents made of raw and grated cucumber; fruit packs of papaya, watermelon and almond paste; dry-fruit packs of almond and oatmeal powder; hair juice of beetroot, grated coconut and neem leaves. Most of the products used are so pure, they can really be eaten!

For ten years, Nirmala, as a naturopath, was used to seeing people use �herbal from a bottle�. She discovered that if you cut, say, a veggie like cucumber, it turned bad in two or three hours. Which is why preservatives were used in herbal products to give them a shelf life. �I thought, why use preservatives, why not use the cucumber neat,� she says. �Grind the cucumber daily. It requires a lot of work. But then I was ready for that. I wanted to be different. I knew that herbal sells. But if used naturally, its potency doubles, and the benefits are so easy to see.�

She was then only a part time naturopath and beauty therapist and worked full-time with a corporate house. But Nirmala, who studied naturopathy and alternative medicine, and who is a graduate of herbal and conventional, aromatherapy and cosmetology beauty courses, experimented on friends and put all her �natural herbal� theories in practise. �I spent 18 years with a corporate but I was not satisfied. So I started making and selling beauty products on a small scale to friends. One day when travelling by train, somebody offered me my own product and said, �Use it, it�s good!� That�s when I realised I had to create a brand name and find a proper way to market and sell my products.�

The first thing Nirmala did was to understand what was conventional beauty care and why it depended on chemicals. �That way, I could explain my traditional methods better,� she says. She even did the general beauty course for this purpose. And extended her curiosity by continuing her experiments on people who were not going to salons and who could not afford them. Her advice to people, �Ideally get your skin tested, come in for skin analysis, check out your skin type, then buy beauty products. For instance, almond which has bleaching properties and Vitamin A is used dry for people with ageing skin and soaked for someone with dry skin. I don�t like to sell my products just anywhere and prefer to know who is using them. That�s why there is no mass production though I have a good demand for them.�

The interest was always there. Her own parents had been conservative. Don�t go to beauty salons, go to college, they used to tell Nirmala. �I realised early that if you want to look good, you cannot change your skin colour, but you can learn to love it and live with it,� she says. �And I also realised that anything done with touch of love, works. Like if I massage someone who has a headache, I bring relief. It�s just the technique of love. Any treatment done like this works wonders. It�s like a mother�s touch. Everything else is meaningless.�

Before she gave up her corporate job and set up her Nirmal Herbal Skin & Hair Care business, Nirmala operated for the first ten years from her residence in Chembur, which is predominantly a South Indian area. At that time, only South Indian women were following the traditional beauty recipes, so it was easy for them to believe in what Nirmala had to offer. And gradually word spread. She had to quit her job to take up the business full-time. �It was a difficult choice. But anyway, I was all the time sitting at my desk giving people advice on how to look after themselves and offering beauty tips.�

From Chembur, she expanded her business and went to Bandra in Bombay about five years ago, where some of the city�s most glamorous and famous people live and operate from. �I found a lot of them ironing their hair,� says Nirmala appalled. �I said to them, �Stop, you are ruining your hair!� And I took time to convince them about what was right and what was wrong. Most of them came back to me ready to try out my traditional and natural methods. And now I am at Club Prana in the Hyatt. It is a five-star hotel. And people come here expecting a quick fix! But here it is different. I interact with every single customer, I take down their numbers, contact them later at home and office to get their feedback on how my treatment has worked on them.�

It is a full-time business for Nirmala Shetty now. Her husband, Jay Shetty, even gave up his job to assist her at home in the manufacture of her herbal products. He learnt from her how to make everything and even did a cosmetology course to understand the business better. Jay handles the production of the business totally and Nirmala works as the beauty consultant and doctor. She explains the belief that all her products are edible. �Not all of them are, because some are made of herbs, I would say you could eat about 80 per cent of them. Some even need to be refrigerated like regular foods,� she says. �I don�t believe in bottling fruit and vegetable extracts if they can be used neat. Why bottle a cucumber and papaya extract, for example, when you can grind it and use it fresh? Or watermelon, which when applied to the skin lightens freckles and is very cooling? Or saffron, rose petals, which are both among the country�s heritage of natural products?�

Nirmala Shetty says her concept is entirely about being natural and pure. �Nature is your true beautician, and natural plant extracts can be used in their purest form to serve as effective beauty aids like scrubs, astringents, cleansers, conditioners, shampoos and more. Hair treatments are done with freshly prepared juices of fruits, flowers, leaves and herbs. And you can feed your skin with saffron, wheat germ, aloe, dry fruits, fresh fruits, vegetables and herbs. Hands and feet with pastes of lentils, saffron, almonds and with freshly-ground coconut and dry fruit juices. And she advises people turning to natural and herbal products, �Have faith, give it time, if done continuously it will work wonders for you. The only constraint is time and continuity. An apple a day won�t work, you know.�

Club Prana is an urban spa and fitness centre that offers a selection of luxurious body and beauty treatments, state-of-the-art equipment, rest, rejuvenation, fitness and raquet sport facilities. Its services have been carefully selected keeping in mind today�s fast-paced and stressful lifestyle of people. It has a 2,200 square feet technologically advanced gymnasium featuring the latest international fitness equipment from Techno-Gym of Italy. And the salon offers holistic and natural treatments, facials, hair-styling and grooming for men and women, plus a range of remedial and therapeutic natural treatments personally designed by Nirmala Shetty.

Club Prana
Hyatt Regency Mumbai
Sahar Airport Road.
Bombay 400 099.
Tel: (9122) 5696 1234.

Dry fruit pack
1/4 cup almonds
1/4 cup of oatmeal powder.
Grind both together and store it in air-tight container. Mix 1 tsp of powder with egg white and honey. Great for moisturising and tightening skin.

Cleanser Pack
Grind green gram and red masoor dal together and add wild turmeric powder. Ratio 4:1(1 for the powder). This could be mixed with curd, or milk or honey.

Aloe vera as conditioner
Take matured leaf of the aloe vera plant. Slit it to remove the thick gel. Grind it into a sticky juice like gel. Could be used after shampooing hair as conditioner for 5 mins and then rinsed again.

Hair Juice
1/2 cup beetroot slices,
1/2 cup grated coconut
1/2 cup neem leaves
Grind all together or separate. Extract juice and pass through strainer. Apply on scalp and hair. Helps to control dandruff and hair loss

Pack for hair conditioning
Grind, 1/2 cup papaya slice 1/2 cup aloe gel ( slit aloe vera leaf for gel), 1 tsp of lemon juice. Mix all and apply on hair after shampooing

Almond pack
Soak almond seeds overnight. De-skin them in the morning and grind them into a fine paste with milk. Excellent for all skin types. Provides Vitamin A and brightens skin.