Ancient Ritual Arc Modern Home Sauna

Heat! Light! Sound! Comfort! Style! Empathic AI! The Ancient Ritual Arc Sauna has it all. Or at least all it needs to legitimately call itself a "modern" and "experiential" home sauna.

The Arc employs infrared heat, a 360-degree system whose output is less intense than traditional electric or wood-burning stoves, but supposedly more stimulating for your circulatory and lymphatic systems. It certainly allows for longer sauna sessions that won't cook you like an Easter ham, and is generally more practical to use as a heat source in saunas for the home. The science suggests infrared heat aids in everything from sleep quality to detoxification to post-workout recovery time to burning more calories while you sit there and do nothing but sweat.

On top of the standard heat therapy, Ancient Ritual also adds light and sound therapy to the Arc, plus gives you the option to sync the two together. The sauna interior has various mood lighting settings and chromotherapy lightscapes "to boost emotional balance and harmony," and is fitted with a 2.1 surround sound system "that blankets your senses in a rich, vibrational sound bath to recalibrate the nervous system and increase cellular resonance." Both features are accessible via the Ancient Ritual app, which also has a library of meditation and mindfulness content you can pair with preprogrammed Sensescapes.

The best feature of the Arc Sauna, in my opinion, is the cushioned, 150-degree reclining lounge chair that sits inside instead of hard-ass benches made of nothing but wood slats and 90-degree angles. The Arc chair has an adjustable headrest, armrests, and footrests too, so I might actually be able to stand being in the sauna for more than 10 minutes. My perpetually cold wife, She-Ra: Princess of Power, could probably hang out in it all day.

The best feature of the Arc Sauna, in others' opinion, is probably its snazzy contemporary design. It looks like an armoire from, like, I don't know - what's a snazzy contemporary furniture store? West Elm? Design Within Reach? The cabinet comes in Natural Oak or Ebony Black finishes.

And finally, this empathic AI mumbo jumbo. It's not so cutting edge, but the Arc app does team up with the Arc Sauna on what Ancient Ritual is calling Self-Sensing therapy. The process uses a built-in microphone to "create a two-way audio journaling experience" with yourself, and help enhance your emotional intelligence and cognitive awareness. The app can also track your sessions - Self-Sensing, or the guided experiences I mentioned earlier - and the AI learning system will analyze data from them (what data? Don't know.) to create a map of your "self-realization journey."

At printing, Ancient Ritual was accepting reservations for the Arc Sauna by invitation only. You can sign up for an invite, and if accepted, make a $199 deposit on the sauna, with the balance due when they begin shipping in Fall 2023.