The forty-five who practise it in Amsterdam

The cards above give you faces and a few lines apiece, which is the first part of the decision and the least useful. A photograph cannot show weight. It cannot tell you whether a woman’s forearm is as articulate as her hand, or whether the eleventh minute of a stroke carries the same attention as the second. Those are the things that decide a nuru hour, and no portrait has ever held them.

What the gel asks of her

Gel removes friction, and friction is where a masseuse ordinarily reads a body — the small resistance that tells her how hard she is pressing. Take it away and she must judge pressure from breathing, from the set of a shoulder, from whatever she can see, and keep judging it while sustaining a stroke that is not permitted to stop. That is the whole difficulty of the technique. It is also why the good ones work from the forearms, the back and the length of the body, not the hands alone: hands tire well inside twenty minutes, and an hour finds out anyone who has not learned to spread the effort. Stamina and patience, in that order, and then the willingness to hold an unhurried tempo long after the novelty has worn off.

Forty-five women work Amsterdam for us. Each was met in person before she began rather than assessed through a thread of messages, and the photographs on these pages were taken by us rather than sent to us, which is a small guarantee and the only sort worth offering. They are between twenty-one and thirty, and some two dozen nationalities are represented among them. Neither figure tells you much about how an hour will go, which is why they sit at the end of a paragraph rather than the top of a page.

How to choose

There are two workable ways. Choose a face, send us her name, and you will be told plainly whether she is free tonight. Or describe the evening you have in mind — the technique, the length, whether there will be two of you — and let us say who is working and who is best suited to it, which is a question we can answer and a photograph cannot. For four hands, ask early; some pairs have worked together long enough to share a rhythm, and they are worth waiting an hour for.

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