Four techniques, each a variation on the same principle: warmth, weight, and a hand that does not lift. Beside them sit the longer formats, an evening or a night, where the massage is one part of the company rather than the whole of it.
Five entries is a short list, and the shortness is the point of it. Each one is a variation on a single idea — a surface made slippery enough that a hand, a forearm or the whole length of a body can travel from shoulder to ankle without once lifting — and what separates them is the medium, the coverage, or the number of people, never the principle. A sixth thing borrowed from another tradition would amount to saying the first five were not enough to spend an evening inside. They are.
They are confused often enough to be worth separating. Nuru is worked in gel: heavy, odourless, warmed before the bottle is opened, slow to leave the skin, and able to hold its weight for an hour without renewal. Soapy is worked in foam and warm water, which is lighter, quicker, and refreshed continually rather than sustained. The gel asks that the room be warm before she arrives. The soap asks only that there be somewhere it is sensible to be wet. If what appeals is the unbroken glide, the long stroke that never breaks contact, that is nuru; if it is warmth and water and the washing itself taken as the treatment, that is soapy.
The other three name something other than the medium. Body to body names the coverage: the contact runs the full length rather than ending at the wrists, and it can be carried in gel or in warm oil. Four-hand names the arithmetic: two therapists, one rhythm, and a body that can no longer track where the next pressure is coming from. Sensual names the pace, the slowest of the five, and it is what most people mean when they cannot yet say what they mean.
Take an hour of nuru or of sensual, or ninety minutes if the evening allows. An hour is enough for the gel to make its case; the extra half hour is where the session stops resembling an appointment. Four-hand sits better as a second booking than a first, because it is easier to appreciate once you know what one pair of hands does with the same gel. Say which of the five you want, since they make quite different demands of a room, and say if you are unsure; that is an ordinary thing to write and easily answered.