Good In Bed
What to do instead of texting "feel better!!" plus: where to get the world's fanciest soap, hospital Kryptonite, how to optimize topicals, and a next-level chicken soup
Sometimes you just have to fold up your cards and go to bed. People get sick, they break bones, their hearts break. My great-grandmother, reportedly in good health at the time, went to bed one day and didn’t get out for ten years. I have a friend whose I’m-not-available phone message says, patiently, “I can’t get away from my bed just now, but if you leave a message…”
We go to bed to repair ourselves. (Staying in bed for 10 years is rarely restorative, but an average taking-to-your-bed usually is.) Sometimes what’s wrong can be fixed, and sometimes it can’t, but in either case, the moment someone is accepting visitors, it’s time to visit. Bring your presence most of all, but also gossip from the world outside (edited so as not to send people into despair), and also, a present. For the latter, consider the restorative power a beauty item at least as seriously as you do food and flowers.
The message of a beauty item is: I heartily endorse (can we say that every once in a while in place of “support”?) your efforts to repair and take care of yourself. So I am giving you something to take care of yourself with.
List: 5 Excellent Items to Cheer Someone Stuck In Bed
Soap from the everything-is-always-beautiful Flamingo Estate. One gorgeous bar of the tomato-leaf scented soap brick can sit, opened, by your patient’s bed, looking and smelling of both the natural world and unbridled luxury (the site accurately describes the scent as “drunk on sunshine and giddy with lycopene”, which I think deserves the #goals hashtag more than anything ever written). Your patient will want to save the exquisite box it comes in, too. Or get the assortment box of soap bricks—the Flamingo Estate boxes really feel like gifts—which will send pretty much anyone into a happy delirium.
The soap bricks from Flamingo Estate are enormous and can be sliced if you like regular-size bars—here is the remaining 2/3s of my favorite, the Heirloom-Tomato-Leaf one. The slicing is very satisfying, but having the full giant soap in your shower is equally so. I also love the Green Goddess one, and the Jasmine Damask Rose. Thick, rich, enchantingly-scented foot or body cream. Especially good if you know the person well enough to massage their feet. Massaging someone’s feet says, “I am devoted to you” like few other gestures. I read a story about a homeless health center where the doctors and nurses washed the feet of each person as they arrived. Just the reversal of the usual positions—doctor or nurse kneeling before the patient as opposed to looking down upon them—flipped the dynamics in a way that powerfully engendered trust. A foot massage is also a brilliant replacement for conversation if someone is too ill or tired to talk.
Just as I’m not such an eye-cream believer—whatever face treatment I’m using, I use it under my eyes, too—I’m not such a foot-specific-cream believer. I love body butters or balms just as much as foot-specific creams.
The super-moisturizing ingredients are epic—coQ10, hyaluronic, shea—but it’s the light-yet-unctuous texture that makes The Whipp from Mantle so unusual and so amazing. It sinks in like magic (the “slip” is almost as if it were made with silicones, which it is not) and it smells subtly citrusy, and there’s just—no cream like it. 
This “Lavender by the Sea” cream is more like a rich oil-balm, and it smells like a field of lavender on the ocean, which is exactly where I like to be transported. 
Topical magnesium helps more for sore muscles, while oral magnesium is said to work better for sleep. I take 3 magnesium threonate capsules before bed, and I also massage my feet with this gorgeous magnesium spray from UMA. Founder Shrankhla Holecek gave me the best tip re any topical you’re wanting to absorb: get in between your toes, where your skin is thinnest.
