I have a confession to make: I love to be slathered with mud. I also love to be rubbed with Dead Sea salts and mummified with seaweed. And there's nothing I find more exhilarating than knowing that I have just emerged victorious from a hair-raising bikini-wax session, ready to look my finest at the beach.

In short, I am a spa addict -- the more exotic, the better.

In Tokyo, however, birthplace of exotic products such as the now-popular sumi (black charcoal) face masks which reportedly draw out impurities with a paste that makes you look like a creature from the tar pits, it can actually be a challenge simply to find skilled estheticians for something as simple as a facial.

Therefore, because I wouldn't want you, dear reader, to suffer the humiliation of a botched facial or an eyebrow wax gone awry, I have once again become a beauty lab rat so that you would never have to. Below are some of Tokyo's best.

"Clients who come to Boudoir want relaxation and pampering," says Miss Marilyn, owner of Tokyo's popular day spa Boudoir. "It's like a little sanctuary for them. There really isn't anything professional for foreign clientele in Tokyo."

Boudoir, located near the Harajuku and Aoyama shopping districts, offers a welcome respite for city-weary souls. "Ninety-nine percent of the clients are stressed," says Miss Marilyn. "Our goal is making people feel better about themselves and to give them confidence."

If you're looking for a celestial treatment to remove all the city grime that your skin battles on a daily basis, the first thing you'll want to book is the hydradermic facial. The hydradermic, which uses electrotherapy to increase the penetration of the products, cleanses, hydrates and regenerates the skin's deep layers. While you lie back and relax in one of Boudoir's seductive treatment rooms, decorated with furniture Miss Marilyn brought back from Bali, her heavenly hands will exfoliate, cleanse and massage your skin back to health and most likely lull you into a deep sleep.

"We're not just a beauty sanctuary," says Miss Marilyn, who uses the French skin-care line Guinot exclusively in the salon. "We place a lot of emphasis on treating skin problems."

Miss Marilyn, an Australian native who has been practicing skin care for the past 12 years, and who started her popular day spa out of her Tokyo home several years ago, is also known as much for her anything-goes attitude as she is for her amazing and professional services.

One of the most popular services at Boudoir is the Playboy wax, a bikini wax which comes in two forms: full hair removal or a little strip in the middle (which I call the runway), known popularly in the U.S. as the Brazilian bikini wax.

I braved the runway -- and became a convert. When my husband went in the following day to use a gift certificate for a facial, Miss Marilyn was eager to hear how he liked it. Through a cream mask, my shocked husband nodded approval.

"The husbands really love it," says Miss Marilyn.

Boudoir is located at Maison Kawai 101, 2-25-3 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku. To book an appointment, call (03) 3478-5898.

Maiko Kato at the Park Hyatt Hotel's luxurious Studio Hatsuko spa agrees that Tokyo has some catching up to do in the beauty and skin-care industry. In fact, she was so frustrated with the lack of modern skin-care techniques available in Japan that she packed up and went to the U.K. to study the latest in skin care and aromatherapy.

Now she has brought her skills to the Park Hyatt, which she says is one of the few places in Tokyo concerned with and able to provide good skin-care and beauty treatment. She is currently working on integrating her practices with Studio Hatsuko's philosophy.

"I couldn't study the deeper things that I wanted to here in Japan," says Kato. "The Japanese beauty industry thinks it's important to focus on losing weight and makes clients spend a lot of money on beauty treatment programs which are only concerned with beauty on the outside.

"If we are going to successfully treat clients' skin we need to learn things about both physical and mental problems."

In Studio Hatsuko's atmosphere of upmarket city chic, expert hands delivered a facial so relaxing and thorough that I almost had to be forced out of the treatment room.

The spa, which also uses an exclusive line of French skin-care products, offers other treatments as well, such as massage, waxing and pedicure. The pedicure, which I also sampled, is guaranteed to satisfy all the globe-trotting spa-savvy customers that come to the Park Hyatt. So thorough was it that my feet felt like a newborn's skin for weeks. It seems I have no choice but to return for more.

Studio Hatsuko is located inside the Park Hyatt Hotel, 3-7-1-2 Nishi-Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku. To book an appointment, call (03) 5322-1234 or (03) 5323-3871

Honorable mention: Eve, home of the akasuri scrub, a rousing Korean massage-and-scrub technique designed to exfoliate skin, continually gets rave reviews from clients who never knew they had that much skin to scrub off in the first place.

The standard course is the akasuri oil massage, for which Eve's experts will vigorously scrub and rub every dead skin cell off your body until you shine. You can make a day of it by adding the sauna, cucumber pack, shampoo and rinse and a break for some of the traditional Korean cuisine also available.