I have been invited to Budapest by Stephen and Margaret de Heinrich de Omorovicza, founders of Hungarian skincare brand Omorovicza, whose products use the city’s thermal waters, together with a patented “healing concentrate” – created by fermenting the waters to harness their beneficial minerals – and treated local mineral-rich mud. “The whole point of everything we are doing has to do with the geology of the place,” Stephen said to me before I arrived here. “The springs in Hungary are grotesquely rich in minerals because of its unique geology.” 

The Triassic geological formations of the region – specifically the Carpathian Basin, which is divided by the Danube – means more than 10,000 years’ worth of rainwater runs through the carbonate rock on the Buda side of the city and combines with a small amount of sea water captured (and mineralised) in the rock deposited in Miocene times (about 23 to 5.3 million years ago) on the Pest side. “There’s a massive fissure right by the Danube, which means that these waters plunge all the way down to where it’s very, very hot,” says Stephen. “And they come back up charged with minerals.” Bathing in them, adds Margaret, gives you a “sense of vitality” – something the couple believe they have captured in their treatments. This September, they are bringing those treatments to a new Omorovicza Institute on London’s South Audley Street, a standalone sister to the Budapest flagship. 

There are more than 1,000 hot springs in Hungary and 100 in Budapest, and there have been healing baths since the 16th century, built during Ottoman rule, a 160-year period when the Turks formalised springs once visited by the Celts and later the Romans by creating hammam-inspired spaces. A sign at the Rudas baths commemorates their completion under Pasha Sokoli Mustafa, governor of Buda between 1566 and 1578. Many were updated during the Austro-Hungarian era in grand Szecesszió (art nouveau) style, but the rituals continue just as they have done for 450 years.

Bathing is a huge part of Hungarian life. At one end of the spectrum, doctors prescribe visits to these variously calcium-, magnesium-, sodium-, sulphate- and fluoride-rich waters to cure ailments including joint aches and arthritis. At the other, baths are part of a quasi-club culture, serving alcohol at “sparties”. At the resplendent 1,900-capacity neo-baroque Széchenyi Palace baths in the City Park, which stays open until 2am, I see that one of the many baths is exclusively reserved for beer drinking. Outside, gentlemen with bronzed bellies sit around playing Magyar kártya – cards beautifully decorated with leaves, acorns, bells and hearts. Others play chess on limestone boards fixed in the water. Children eat ice creams. Spa life is life. 

It’s also written deep into the Omorovicza DNA. It was on a trip to the Rácz Fürdő, the oldest thermal baths in Budapest, around 20 years ago, that Stephen discovered that his ancestor, Dr Janos de Heinrich de Omorovicza, had been an eminent 19th-century balneologist who opened this set of five public baths in 1861. It was a revelation. Stephen’s family had left Hungary after the communists took control after the second world war. “I used to hear a lot of stories about Budapest because people loved to talk about life in Hungary before the war,” he says. “But nobody ever mentioned a bath.”

Walking around the Rácz today offers a gothic fantasy of decadence and disarray; it has been closed for more than a decade but the 19th-century grandeur is manifest. I wind down a debris-covered peach-stone staircase with decorative iron banisters to the baths. At every turn is ornate Szecesszió ironwork, from birdcage-like showers to sculptural taps. Black, white and pink marble floor tiling encircles the bathing space. Neoclassical sculptures and relief carvings line the passageways, by turns crumbling and perfectly composed. Walls and ceilings are painted in Klein blues, blush and sandy tones. Much of the paintwork is peeling. Taped to the walls are reconstruction plans for a grand reopening pencilled for 2024 (including Omorovicza treatment rooms). It’s part cinematic, part museum vaults, part dream. 

Omorovicza was born of this legacy. Seduced by the romantic tales told by his grandparents, Stephen, who grew up in Switzerland, had returned to Budapest, and was CEO of a biometrics start-up in the city. Together with his wife Margaret, the chief of staff at the US embassy in Hungary, who began to notice the benefits of the waters on her skin, they began to wonder if there was a way of taking Dr Janos’ belief in the healing power of the waters and “transforming those minerals into something the skin can absorb”. The answer, reached with scientists at the same Nobel Prize-winning laboratory of dermatology that discovered vitamin C in 1928, was bio-fermentation, which takes the thermal water and adds yeast to create a complex compound of minerals that is easily absorbed into the skin, deep into the epidermis. The result is the “healing concentrate”. This patented innovation, clinically proven to reduce transepidermal water loss and increase skin firmness and elasticity, was launched in 2006 and is now used across the entire line.

I am excited for my facial at the Omorovicza Institute, a high-ceilinged boutique and therapy rooms on Andrássy út, a grand avenue nicknamed the Champs-Elysées, dating to 1872, that, like many roads built in the Austro-Hungarian era, draws upon Paris’s aristocratic boulevards. Up the street is the French Renaissance-style Drechsler Palace, the former ballet institute that has been renovated by the W hotel group, a sensuous mix of 19th-century architecture and the jewel-toned hues and contemporary design that the W has made its signature.

I don’t know why no one ever used these healing products in cosmetics before. It’s a genius idea

My Omorovicza facialist, Adrienne, was the first specialist to join the company when it launched in 2006 and was instrumental in the development of products and protocols. She analyses my skin and prescribes a copper peel to remove dead cells, vitamin C eye cream, a deep-cleansing mud mask using treated local mud mixed with white clay to exfoliate and draw out toxins, application of the healing concentrate serum and a 20-minute Hungarian facial massage. Facial gymnastics may have gone viral on TikTok, but the techniques have been practised by Hungarian and Austrian facialists for more than 150 years, laughs Adrienne, who trained for three years in the skill. “Massage is part of the active healing… so the concentrate can really penetrate,” she tells me. “I don’t know why no one ever used these healing products in cosmetics before. It’s a genius idea.” The experience leaves me feeling invigorated and my skin lifted, plumped and glowing.

I particularly love the Queen of Hungary mist, inspired by a 14th-century queen’s bespoke orange blossom and rosemary scent, said to be the first modern perfume. Likewise the vitamin C serum that draws upon biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi’s discovery. Most intriguing is the Moor Mud collection, which includes treated mineral-rich mud from the peat bogs around Lake Héviz.

The scenic road south-west to Lake Héviz weaves through fields of wild lavender, vineyards, and farmland filled with corn, wheat and sunflowers. We wend past thatched cottages, stern medieval castles atop rocky hills, and along the 78km length of Lake Balaton, which sits on a volcanic soil bed. People fish for 30kg catfish, swim and feast outdoors. 

Héviz is the world’s largest bioactive natural lake, whose spring waters, dating from volcanic activity 200mn years ago, range from 22ºC to 38ºC. Thick forest surrounds the 4.4-hectare surface; a turreted neo-baroque building appears to float over its lily pad-blanketed waters; groups of people float about while others lounge on the banks, sunbathing, reading, sleeping.

Legend has it that the nanny of a paralysed child in the Roman period prayed to the Virgin Mary and the result was this spring of healing water; the child grew up to become the Roman emperor Theodosius. True or not, a bathing culture has flourished since Roman times. Rita Vas-Barna, balneologist and head of treatments at Héviz, tells me that the waters’ power is held in the combination of their heat, chemicals and hydrostatic pressure. The waters are so plentiful they replenish themselves every three days, she adds. Meanwhile, the mildly radioactive mud used in treatments at Héviz is rich in radon, sulphuric substances, calcium, magnesium, bicarbonate zinc, copper and fulvic acid, and is taken from a local source at Alsópáhok (on rotation, so it can replenish itself), milled and sterilised, and heated to 42ºC. The lake, Vas-Barna says, is particularly beneficial for those with psoriasis, burns and joint pains. 

I am led to a lakeside treatment room surrounded by simple canvas screens, where a therapist and a wooden bucket of mud await me. The all-over body massage is firm, thorough and deep. Then comes the mud – thick, warm, soft, grainy and black (thanks to the humic acid), it is both exfoliating and tingly; it feels active, almost alive. I am wrapped up like a parcel so it can soak into my skin. When she returns, the therapist ladles sulphurous water directly from the lake to douse me down. My skin is silky-soft.

Alongside the healing blue‑green algae found in many other lakes, which are often used in skincare products, Héviz contains two more algae species that are great for the skin. Together with the natural postbiotics (substances that probiotic microbes produce) in the mud, it’s “perfect for the microbiome of your skin”, says Stephen. “It restores it by bringing all these bacteria to bear on the skin.”

It might seem bizarre for a luxury beauty brand but, drawing from Lake Héviz’s ancient rituals, Omorovicza takes mud from local peat bogs and treats it so it can be used in the Moor Mud line. The microbial species have been working away for millennia, not something you can easily recreate in a lab. It’s potent stuff. “When we started formulating,” says Stephen, “we initially had it at a 10 to 15 per cent mud concentration, and it was just painful. So we dialled it down.” The cleansing mask combines the mud with white clay; the thermal cleansing balm, to remove make-up, mixes it with sweet almond oil. Much of the line tingles to the touch; like the mud wrap at the lake, it somehow feels alive. 

“Skin therapy is how we deliver on this promise of the geology,” concludes Margaret. “We do it through two pillars: through the healing concentrate and balneotherapy treatments.” Budapest in a bottle, you might say. 

Beatrice Hodgkin travelled as a guest of Omorivicza. One-hour facial at the Omorovicza Institute, £125; 60 South Audley, London W1. Day passes to the Rudas baths, from Ft5,900 (about £13.15). Day pass to Lake Héviz, about £17; mud massage, about £25. Rooms at the W hotel start from £390 per night 

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Beatrice Hodgkin

The track winds to a wide-fronted and narrow-waisted Tudor house built in dark-red diaper brick. Cosseting it are three greeny-black moats, whose patterns play games with logic. One streak of water comes from nowhere to run along the face of the house, while another snakes behind then disappears, engulfed by a new vision: a maze of towering topiary that points and undulates, hides and exposes. To the south of the main building is a moss-covered caravan engraved with hearts and birds; beside it, a converted cowshed with an arched and iron-studded wooden door. Here, sheltering from the wind, is the beating heart of the Beckley Foundation. 

Feilding created this non-profit organisation in an outbuilding of her family home in 1998 following a frustrating 30-year one-woman crusade. Her vision: to work with leading scientists from around the world to establish the true effects of psychedelics. The foundation’s aim is to reform global drug policy based on scientific evidence and safely reintegrate psychedelics into society. In 2016, its Beckley/Imperial College London study was the first of its kind to demonstrate that psychotherapy in conjunction with psilocybin (the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms) could be effective for treatment-resistant depression. 

Feilding was born at Beckley in 1943, the fourth child to parents she describes as “absolutely charming” but also “anarchist in intellectual temperament”. She remembers her farmer/artist father saying, “Whatever the authorities or the government tells you to do – do the opposite.” It was the middle of the war, and the “freezing” house was packed with family escaping from London, as well as refugees. “We ran wild,” she says. Upstairs, a bedroom now drenched in golden tones and centred around a four-poster bed upcycled by Feilding was the nursery. A glass-fronted cupboard in the corner is filled with the dead-eyed plastic dolls she once played with. 

The house is a jigsaw of rooms that interlock rather than running off a central space. It’s rich in historical grandeur but also, with its modestly sized rooms dominated by huge stone fireplaces, exudes cosiness. Feilding’s grandparents bought the house in 1919, custodians in the footsteps not only of King Alfred, but also Henry III (who gave the then-incarnation of the house to his brother, the scheming Earl of Cornwall); Edward II (who gave it to his rumoured lover, Piers Gaveston); the Black Prince (father of Richard II); and Lord Williams of Thame, who built the current house on the medieval site. “The mists come in and it’s a magical place,” says Feilding. “Somehow there’s a strange magic, maybe partly because of the history that bubbled here.

“It’s a good setting for ideas,” she continues. “It’s got a feeling of being an island outside culture in which you are free to explore.” Her grandmother, she tells me, welcomed a merry-go-round of creatives including Aldous Huxley, who set his novel Crome Yellow at Beckley after visiting for tea in 1921. Presciently, his book The Doors of Perception explores the effects of mescaline on consciousness. 

“As part of my work, I entertain people two or three times a week,” says Feilding over lunch in the slim puzzle piece of a dining room, its wooden table and tapestry-covered chairs running alongside a vast fireplace and 18th-century lighthouse reflector. “Lots of seminal meetings have happened here.” Most recently there have been American philanthropists; Feilding is keen for them to support the US-based non-profit arm. 

Beckley Park helped to attract researchers and funders because of its ambience and sense of history – as well as Amanda’s hospitality

She tells me that the latest fundraising push is to support her new “double-headed” research programme, created in collaboration with scientists from King’s College London, Cornell and the University of Basel, to name but three. This “deep exploration of LSD” will look into, on the one hand, the mystical and spiritual effects of full dosage, and on the other, therapeutic applications for microdosing in ageing communities – including those with Alzheimer’s – and a new concept for care homes. “This project is the culmination of what I’ve been wanting to do,” she says.

“My hope is that the concept of altered states of consciousness is accepted by society and that it can be beneficial for those who want it,” she says of her holy grail. Her hypothesis is that psychedelics “increase the energy to the brain, which must logically be a good thing. It increases neuroplasticity. It increases neurogenesis – and that is the basis of learning and adapting. And that’s what humanity must have to survive… There’s a growing epidemic of mental illness – we’re a very troubled animal – and we need to adapt to a very different world. And consciousness is key. What is more key, in a sense?”

Psychedelics are not the extent of Feilding’s experiments with consciousness. In the bigger of two living rooms – hung with glorious yellow curtains, and grand images of Susanna and the Elders and The Death of Seneca – a skull peeks out from behind some flowers. Six large coin-sized holes are bored into it. A gift from her second husband, James Charteris (the 13th Earl of Wemyss and 9th Earl of March, and the reason Feilding is a countess), it dates from “thousands of years ago” and is a symbol of their shared fascination with trepanation. 

I did it to change the world. Which it has helped to do

Dating from the Stone Age, the practice of drilling a hole in the skull is believed by advocates to increase blood flow to the brain, increasing energy, creativity and higher states of consciousness. Aged 27, Feilding practised the act on herself with a dentist’s drill, while partner Joe Mellen filmed it as a documentary “artwork” called Heartbeat in the Brain. “All you’re doing is removing a piece of bone so that the membranes surrounding the brain can expand as much as they want to. So you are giving back full systolic pressure to the muscle and the benefit of that is a little bit more blood in the cranial cavity in the capillaries... and the benefit of that is increased energy.” Supposedly, straight after, she wrapped her head in a bandage and a turban and headed out to a party. So impressed was she with the effects that she not only convinced Charteris to be trepanned several decades later, but also twice stood for Parliament, in 1979 and 1983, campaigning for “trepanation for the National Health”. 

Feilding describes standing for Parliament as a “conceptual artwork”, a term she also levels at the Beckley Foundation. “I think it’s a work of art, and I think it’s a rather successful work of art,” she says. “My aim was to no longer be Amanda Feilding, a female with no letters to my name, [and to] become a foundation and get the best scientists in the world, put them on my board. That’s why it’s a conceptual artwork.” Board members have included the late neurobiologist Sir Colin Blakemore, and collaborators the former government adviser Professor Nutt. She is proud of her creation: “I did it to change the world. Which it has helped to do.” 

This year, the foundation marks its 25th anniversary and Feilding has turned 80. Birthday toasts included those from biologist and author Merlin Sheldrake, who called her “a passionate and fearless advocate for psychedelic research [whose] efforts have helped transform the study of these remarkable compounds”, and Dr David Luke, associate professor of psychology at the University of Greenwich, who said: “I can think of no one in the UK who has worked harder and more consistently than her, over six decades, to bring psychedelics back into the light of consciousness in both science and drug policy.” Coincidentally – or perhaps not at all – 80 years of LSD is also being celebrated. Although Swiss chemist Albert Hofman synthesised the compound derived from the ergot fungus in 1938, he only appreciated its properties five years later when he ingested 250mcg and had an interesting cycle ride home – hence the name given to 19 April by the psychedelic community: Bicycle Day. 

Feilding feels her role in “The Psychedelic Renaissance” has been pivotal: “In a sense I did take on the world’s law,” she says. “And I think we’ll win. I’ve always felt it was the winning side.” Over the decades, she has been called everything from “the crackpot countess” and a “hedonistic hippie” to “the Queen of Consciousness”. Now, more than $3bn has been raised by psychedelics prospectors, many of them from Silicon Valley, to explore their benefits in conditions from depression and anorexia to PTSD. 

She is “delighted” also that her two sons (with Mellen) have “picked up the baton”. Each has taken Beckley in a new, for profit, direction: Rock Feilding-Mellen, 44, is developing Beckley Retreats, whose first “psychedelic healing retreats” launched this year in Jamaica and the Netherlands, and whose round of seed funding in October 2022 saw a $1.5mn investment. Younger son Cosmo is the CEO of Beckley Psytech, a biotechnology company exploring the potential of synthetic psychedelics to be licensed for neuropsychiatric treatments; it announced in February that it had received Investigational New Drug (IND) approval from the FDA for a global study. 

Feilding, however, maintains a certain distance: “I’m not against profit. But my aim is to do good for the world. And I don’t want that contaminated by, you know, profit.” She plans to continue focusing on the foundation’s specific quest from her HQ at Beckley Park. “It is part of my soul. I couldn’t imagine living without Beckley. I have always loved it as a being. I think it is rather primal.”

Beatrice Hodgkin will chair a session on psychedelics at the FTWeekend Festival at the Kennedy Center, Washington DC, on 20 May. For in-person and online tickets, visit ftweekendfestival.com

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Beatrice Hodgkin