California's Resort At Pelican Hill Spa Leans Into Sleep Tourism Trend
View of Resort at Pelican Hill in Newport Beach, California
The Resort at Pelican Hill in Newport Coast, California is tapping into the growing sleep tourism movement. The luxurious property in South Orange County kicked off its quarterly Buona Notte Nighttime Ritual series on May 8, to ignite a larger conversation about the intersection between sleep and wellness.
'Sleep tourism is the choice of travel experiences that support deep rest, relaxation and wellbeing,' explains the Spa at Pelican Hill's director Nichole Hester. 'Today's guests are looking beyond the standard amenities and choosing destinations designed to restore energy, reset their natural rhythms, and prioritize sleep as an essential part of their overall health.'
As part of their 7-9 p.m. program, the resort will offer some kind of masterclass element where guests can learn hands-on, expert-led self-care, along with additional relax-inducing activities. The kickoff, for example, featured an immersive nighttime skincare routine hosted by Barcelona-based luxury beauty brand Natura Bissé. The brand's renowned global skincare educator Yushing Foo led a 40-minute wind-down routine. Guests also took in a guided meditation and intimate self-reflection in the spa's relaxation room, while walking away with sleep-centric gifts from the hotel.
Following the success of its sold-out launch, the team decided to continue with an August 7 session. The event will feature a masterclass by Cord Coen, founder of vegan skincare and fragrance brand Zents, along with its sister brand Antara Organics.
Hester says the objective is to get guests' minds and bodies prepared for a good night's sleep to function at their highest capacity for the remainder of their visit at the hotel.
Spa at Pelican Hill in Newport Beach's relaxation room
'Wellness starts with rest because it creates the foundation for positive energy, ideas, and engagement,' she shares. 'We want to create relationships with our guests that nurture their well-being beyond their time in the spa. We use the term Benessere, which means to be well in your body and mind: focused, present, and ready to enjoy the moment. It's about abundance—fresh air, fresh, seasonal food, movement that creates energy, joy in simple pleasures and fostering connections with family and friends.'
While a spa service isn't required in order to purchase a $185 ticket to the intimate event, it can of course amplify relaxation and restoration for the frequent traveler or anyone generally in need of a reset.
The Spa at Pelican Hill offers 22 private treatment rooms designed for massages and facials, with 23,000 square feet devoted to a wall of flowing water, steam rooms, saunas and saltwater Roman soaking tubs. The calm of the spa complements the nature of the five-star, five diamond, Italian-inspired hotel as a whole. Designed as a coastal oasis, its coliseum pool features a backdrop of the Pacific Ocean, with scenic views of the luscious Pelican Hill Golf Club.
'The resort has a natural serenity that guests often comment on,' Hester says. 'We frequently hear that our guests sleep really well when they're here. While sleep tourism is a popular and likely enduring trend, we set out to create a spa-specific experience that amplifies the resort's organic tranquility, and paired it with a usable self-care routine.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CBS News
2 hours ago
- CBS News
Bay Area family shares frustrations after FDA rejects drug for ultra-rare Barth Syndrome
With the FDA recently rejecting a drug application that aims to help those living with Barth Syndrome, one Bay Area family is frustrated by the delay of approved treatments in the rare disease community. Approximately 150 people live with Barth Syndrome nationwide, an ultra-rare genetic disorder that affects only males and impacts muscle and heart muscle health. "He has a severe heart failure, and was admitted to the hospital where he was on intravenous medications to help his heart pump," Megan Branagh, whose son Henry has Barth Syndrome, told CBS News Bay Area. Megan's son was diagnosed with the disease when he was three months old. "There's no treatment or cure for it at all, just simply symptom management," she said. There are currently no FDA-approved therapies for the disease, but Stealth BioTherapeutics has been working for years to get a target drug approved. "Extremely long and delayed," Megan said. "We were supposed to get an answer in January, and FDA asked for a three-month extension based on some data they had requested." The drug, elamipretide, targets cardiolipins, a molecule in the mitochondria that is a key source for the gene defect. It's the only drug for Barth Syndrome clinical trials. After several delays, however, the FDA announced it will not be approving the drug application. Megan believes federal budget cuts could be one of the reasons. "There was only one person left remaining at the FDA who had a hand on our case for this final part of it," she said. "We've heard from the current administration the desire to make medication available for the rare disease community, and the support of the rare disease community. And this case defies everything that has been publicly stated over the last few months." The FDA instead recommended that more data be included in the company's resubmission of the drug application. While the company said they are optimistic for a new path forward with the agency, families like the Branaghs are anxiously waiting for the approval. "Sickening to know that there's something out there that could make a difference that might never be available for Henry or anyone else," she said. Her son is 13 years old and has endured many challenges, taking at least eight pills a day and making frequent trips to the doctor's office. "I do it and I just get it over with," Henry Branagh told CBS News Bay Area. "And I wait six more months, and they usually put a heart monitor for two days and I take it off." He shared that he enjoys playing sports, including baseball, soccer, skiing, and swimming. "I love playing with my friends," Henry said. He added that he does take more frequent breaks to maintain his heart health, and hopes there will be more treatment options for him soon. "It'd be really nice for me to have it too, because my wish is to like live one day be normal without having Barth Syndrome," Henry said. "Mainly when I'm in sports, and I'm running around, and I get tired and other kids are running way faster and have way better stamina." Dr. Hitenda Patel, the Branagh's family cardiologist, told CBS News Bay Area that he doesn't see the application rejection as a denial. "I think the FDA wants a little more data on its efficacy," Patel, who is also the pediatric cardiology director at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital in Oakland, said. "There are a lot more designer drugs being developed. And designer drugs specifically, are often for rare diseases. And if you only have, let's say, at the most 500 patients in the world, it's very hard to get approval based on the current mandates for the FDA," he added. Patel said FDA approvals in the pediatric rare disease community are an even bigger hill to climb. "It seems like it's a delaying tactic, but I think you have to respect the FDA and its process because it's what has allowed to develop many things," he said. "And ultimately, they are in charge of the safety of the American people." He said that with work from those like the Branagh's do make an impact. "With advocacy such as the Barth Syndrome and what the Branaghs are doing, FDA has realized that there is a huge difference between approval process that is needed for the pediatric and rare disease market as opposed to something that is more common," Patel said. "Because the FDA has its mandates and you have to go through the trial process, it takes a long, long, long time." Patel said he remains optimistic for the community that often gets overlooked. And so, the fight continues for the Branaghs. "Super proud. He inspires us to live our best every moment and take nothing for granted," Henry's mother said. "I think the worst thing to watch as a parent to know that your kid has something that you can't do anything about." She adds that she will continue to fight for his health, no matter how long it takes. "My parents help me out a lot, they just always push me and encourage me to keep on going," Henry said. CBS News Bay Area reached out to Stealth BioTherapeutics, and a spokesperson said that while there is no public timeline yet for next steps, they are working closely with the FDA urgently to reach approval. Meanwhile, the Branaghs are preparing for their next fundraising campaign that will take place at the JBL Ranch on September 27. "Our family started something called Happy Heart Week, that is an awareness and fundraising campaign all around Barth Syndrome. 13 years now, and all the funds go directly to the foundation to support everything that they're doing," she said.
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
A scientific breakthrough researchers call ‘magic' could transform treatment for a leading cause of death
For all of the advancement in treating stroke victims over the past couple of decades, some concerns have remained almost constant. In medicine, we like to say that 'time is brain,' meaning that every moment a stroke goes untreated, the potential for long-term brain damage or death escalates. In fact, every minute that the brain goes without blood flow, the average patient loses around 1.9 million neurons and about a week of independent life, experts say. As the vast majority of strokes are ischemic, with a blood clot blocking the flow of oxygen to the brain, clearing that clot swiftly is critical. This is true whether the clot is small or large and regardless of its density—but reliably removing the densest clots via mechanical means has proved an elusive task. Though these concerns, time and density, are not necessarily linked, both matter—one reason, researchers suggest, that a newly developed technology from Stanford University holds the potential to reshape how stroke patients are treated. The device, called a milli-spinner, is a tiny, powerfully rotating hollow tube outfitted with fins and slits. In action, both lab and swine tests demonstrate the ability to dramatically compact and shrink the size of blood clots, making it easier to remove them quickly and effectively—often on the first try. 'This has the potential to be a game changer,' says Greg Albers, director of the Stanford University Stroke Center and a longtime expert in the field. 'The results are likely to translate well to clinical trials.' Mechanical thrombectomy is a minimally invasive procedure by which blood clots are removed. Existing thrombectomy methods, which involve aspirating clots via a catheter or trying to grab and remove them through a stent, are not designed primarily to reduce the size of blood clots. The milli-spinner appears to do so almost routinely—and very quickly, sometimes in a matter of seconds. In a paper published June 4 in the scientific journal Nature, the milli-spinner boasted some audacious early numbers. In flow model tests and swine experiments, the thrombectomy device, inserted via a catheter, demonstrated the capacity to shrink clots by up to 95%. 'For most cases, we were more than doubling the efficacy of current technology' in terms of opening the artery, says Dr. Jeremy Heit, MD, PhD, chief of neuroimaging and neuro-intervention at Stanford and coauthor of the study. Placed close to a clot, the milli-spinner exerts both compression and shear forces to release red blood cells from the sometimes-dense fibrin that has bound it in a clump—a somewhat unexpected development when it was first observed in the lab, says Renee Zhao, the Stanford engineer who designed the milli-spinner and was lead author of the Nature study. 'It was magic to us, because even after we saw the phenomena, it was not very straightforward to directly figure out the working mechanism,' Zhao tells Fortune. A fibrin core remains tightly bound around the milli-spinner, but it is now dramatically smaller than before, and easily removable. (Imagine placing some cotton candy in your hand and then closing your fist tight.) 'What's crazy is, it works in seconds—it literally will spin this thing into a tiny clot and just suck it into the catheter in seconds,' says Heit. 'It's incredibly fast.' Much work remains, the researchers say, including full-scale human trials. But if the results are even close to what's been achieved in the lab and swine work, the device could alter the treatment path for an all-too-common, all-too-serious medical issue. Strokes are the fifth-leading cause of death in the U.S., with about 160,000 deaths a year among the nearly 800,000 cases diagnosed annually. Roughly nine in 10 strokes are ischemic, or clot-related. Patients with ischemic strokes are often treated with clot-busting drugs like tPA or thrombectomy (sometimes both), but the mechanical techniques still encounter failures. In some cases, a clot is simply too large to be extracted by a stent or aspiration device, or it may be too firmly adhered to a vessel wall. In others, because clots are crumbly, small bits may break off during the retrieval attempt. The blood flow can take them further into the brain, potentially making the size of a stroke bigger or causing a new deficit, says Heit. 'Both aspiration and stent retrievers have a high risk of generating fragmentation,' Zhao says. 'The milli-spinner actually prevents it from happening,' at least in the lab. Current thrombectomy devices successfully remove clots less than 50% of the time on the first try, and in about 15% of cases they fail altogether, experts say. It's important because people in whom the blockage is removed on the first attempt with thrombectomy have better clinical outcomes than those who require multiple passes. 'The outcomes are much better than if it takes you two, three, four tries to get everything open,' says Maresh Jayaraman, chair of diagnostic imaging at Brown University. 'Obviously, we need to know that (the milli-spinner) can be safe and effective in humans. If it is, it has the potential to dramatically revolutionize how we think about removing blood clots from the brain.' Zhao says she and her colleagues weren't actually trying to solve this issue, at least not initially. Rather, the engineer had been working on millirobots—tiny, origami-based spinning devices capable of swimming untethered through the bloodstream. Propelled by an external magnetic field, the millirobots, which are still in development, may be able to deliver medicine to targeted regions in the body, perform diagnostic tasks, or perhaps one day even carry instruments or cameras. The spinning millirobots generate 'a highly localized, very strong suction,' says Zhao. 'We were thinking, okay, can we use that suction to suck a clot? It was just extremely simple—I mean, a very straightforward way of thinking.' In the cerebral artery flow model in the lab, Heit says, the milli-spinner was 100% effective at removing clots in more than 500 attempts. In pigs, the device restored at least half of blood flow to blocked blood vessels 90.3% of the time on the first try, nearly twice the average achieved by aspiration. And it was nearly fourfold better at completely opening the artery for the toughest clots. 'I expect (the device) to be a sea-change in technology for the treatment of acute ischemic stroke patients,' Heit says. 'If blood clots are removed at the high success rates in humans as they are in our experiments, which we expect to be the case, the milli-spinner will save tens of thousands of lives or more, and substantially reduce disability in treated patients.' Human clinical trials are the next step. Areas to watch, says Arthur Adam, a neurosurgeon and stroke expert at University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center, include how human brain tissue is affected by the new thrombectomy method, and how the cells and debris behave once they're liberated from the fibrin by the milli-spinner. 'Human trials are essential, and they sometimes show very different results than what we see in early results,' says Adam. Still, the development appears promising. 'It is a very exciting new device, with great potential,' says Colin Derdeyn, chair of radiology and medical imaging at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. 'If it performs in people as well as it does in these models, it will improve recanalization rates—how frequently we are able to open a blocked artery in the brain, heart, or lung. This will lead to better outcomes in patients with stroke, heart attack and pulmonary embolism.' It may also represent only the front end of the technology. Zhao and her colleagues think the untethered, robotic version of the milli-spinner will be able to swim directly inside blood vessels to treat blood clots, brain aneurysms, kidney stones, and other conditions. In the meantime, the team has formed a company in California to proceed with clinical trials on the milli-spinner. 'Considering the growing patient pool and this very promising technology, I think we can potentially save a lot of patients' lives,' Zhao says. 'We want to see this technology in humans—and the sooner, the better.' This story was originally featured on
Associated Press
4 hours ago
- Associated Press
SBC Medical added to membership of Russell 3000® Index
IRVINE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 27, 2025-- SBC Medical Group Holdings Incorporated (Nasdaq: SBC) ('SBC Medical'), a global franchise and provider of services for aesthetic clinics, has been added as a member of the broad-market Russell 3000 ® Index, effective after the US market opens on June 30, as part of the 2025 Russell indexes reconstitution. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: Yoshiyuki Aikawa-Director (Chairman), CEO Membership in the Russell 3000 ® Index, which remains in place for one year, means automatic inclusion in the large-cap Russell 1000 ® Index or small-cap Russell 2000 ® Index as well as the appropriate growth and value style indexes. Russell indexes are widely used by investment managers and institutional investors for index funds and as benchmarks for active investment strategies. According to the data as of the end of June 2024, about $10.6 trillion in assets are benchmarked against the Russell US indexes, which belong to FTSE Russell, the global index provider. For more information on the Russell 3000 ® Index and the Russell indexes reconstitution, go to the 'Russell Reconstitution' section on the FTSE Russell website. About SBC Medical SBC Medical, headquartered in Irvine, California and Tokyo, Japan, owns and provides management services and products to cosmetic treatment centers. The Company is primarily focused on providing comprehensive management services to franchisee clinics, including but not limited to advertising and marketing needs across various platforms (such as social media networks), staff management (such as recruitment and training), booking reservations for franchisee clinic customers, assistance with franchisee employee housing rentals and facility rentals, construction and design of franchisee clinics, medical equipment and medical consumables procurement (resale), the provision of cosmetic products to franchisee clinics for resale to clinic customers, licensure of the use of patent-pending and non-patented medical technologies, trademark and brand use, IT software solutions (including but not limited to remote medical consultations), management of the franchisee clinic's customer rewards program (customer loyalty point program), and payment tools for the franchisee clinics. For more information, visit About FTSE Russell, an LSEG Business FTSE Russell is a global index leader that provides innovative benchmarking, analytics and data solutions for investors worldwide. FTSE Russell calculates thousands of indexes that measure and benchmark markets and asset classes in more than 70 countries, covering 98% of the investable market globally. FTSE Russell index expertise and products are used extensively by institutional and retail investors globally. Approximately $18.1 trillion is benchmarked to FTSE Russell indexes. Leading asset owners, asset managers, ETF providers and investment banks choose FTSE Russell indexes to benchmark their investment performance and create ETFs, structured products and index-based derivatives. A core set of universal principles guides FTSE Russell index design and management: a transparent rules-based methodology is informed by independent committees of leading market participants. FTSE Russell is focused on applying the highest industry standards in index design and governance and embraces the IOSCO Principles. FTSE Russell is also focused on index innovation and customer partnerships as it seeks to enhance the breadth, depth and reach of its offering. FTSE Russell is wholly owned by London Stock Exchange Group. For more information, visit FTSE Russell. Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are not historical facts or statements of current conditions, but instead represent only the Company's beliefs regarding future events and performance, many of which, by their nature, are inherently uncertain and outside of the Company's control. These forward-looking statements reflect the Company's current views with respect to, among other things, the Company's product launch plans and strategies; growth in revenue and earnings; and business prospects. In some cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as 'may,' 'should,' 'expects,' 'anticipates,' 'contemplates,' 'estimates,' 'believes,' 'plans,' 'projected,' 'predicts,' 'potential,' 'targets' or 'hopes' or the negative of these or similar terms. The Company cautions readers not to place undue reliance upon any forward-looking statements, which are current only as of the date of this release and are subject to various risks, uncertainties, assumptions, or changes in circumstances that are difficult to predict or quantify. The forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and are not guarantees of future performance. The Company does not undertake or accept any obligation to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in its expectations or any change in events, conditions, or circumstances on which any such statement is based, except as required by law. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations may emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for the Company to predict all of them; such factors include, among other things, changes in global, regional, or local economic, business, competitive, market and regulatory conditions, and those listed under the heading 'Risk Factors' and elsewhere in the Company's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the 'SEC'), which are accessible on the SEC's website at View source version on CONTACT: SBC Medical Group Holdings Incorporated (Asia) Hikaru Fukui / Head of Investor Relations E-mail:[email protected] LLC (In the US) Bill Zima / Managing Partner Email:[email protected] KEYWORD: SOUTHEAST ASIA SINGAPORE NORTH AMERICA ASIA PACIFIC JAPAN EUROPE UNITED STATES UNITED KINGDOM CALIFORNIA INDUSTRY KEYWORD: MEDICAL SUPPLIES TECHNOLOGY PROFESSIONAL SERVICES OTHER HEALTH HEALTH HEALTH TECHNOLOGY MEDICAL DEVICES COSMETICS RETAIL DATA ANALYTICS SOFTWARE SOURCE: SBC Medical Group Holdings Incorporated Copyright Business Wire 2025. PUB: 06/27/2025 07:30 PM/DISC: 06/27/2025 07:31 PM
