HERE’S OUR short list of favourite winter health and beauty traditions from around the globe to keep you glowing, happy, in shape and energized during the dark months:

Saunas

5 million and 2 million — those figures are respectively the numbers of humans in Finland and… the number of saunas. 2.5 people per sauna? Sounds like a good time to me. Never more than a stone’s throw away from one a stint in Lappland, are we?

Plus, for the masochists out there, they also like to do a bit of self-flagellation to get you’re circulation going with a bundle of Birch branches. I get all warm inside just thinking about — the sauna, that is.

I’ve also witnessed the Russian (and Baltic) banya (not to be confused with hot springs and baths (banja et al) in various Balkan countries) obsession first hand. A good friend of mine (Russian) has parents who build a sauna every time they move house.

Korea’s Han Jeung Mak are small, super hot huts not entirely unlike Native North American Indian sweat lodges or, indeed, the temezcal of the Mayans.

Next up?

Ice Swimming

Yes, I know this is a decidedly un-warm activity. But it’s still fun, great for circulation and, as long as you don’t give yourself a heart attack from the shock of the cold (or throw your back out from it, as I did once… naked… in a plunge pool in Switzerland. The humiliation).

Plus, it would make a great icy respite from your sweaty sessions in a sauna if you can make a hole in an ice-covered lake a few meters from the door to your sauna hut.

But if you’d rather move around a bit more, there’s always …

Nordic Skiing

Think I’m stretching it by including this in a summary of cool winter beauty traditions? Nope. I’m not.

It’s one of the most intense calorie burns — and thus, arch-enemy of high-winter midriff creep (which gets worse with age) — you’ll ever get and pretty much exclusively available during the winter months. To be found across Northern Europe and, really, anywhere there’s snow and rolling landscape. Or, indeed, if you have ski skins and feel like really working up a sweat while skiing UP the side of a mountain.

Hot Springs

These, on the other, hand, will let you float away all your worries buoyantly swaddled in a pool of steaming, stress-relieving bliss and are their most fun when snows falling all around you as steam rises from the surface of the water. Don’t you agree?

The sulphuric geothermal waters are great for the skin (particularly those with acne) and many of the other minerals in the waters are purportedly great for your health too. Moor mud from Lake Heviz is meant to be anti-inflammatory and healing, which means there’s no reason not to have a mud bath in one of Hungary’s spas this winter.

Find hot springs everywhere from New Zealand (Hot Water Beach, for one) to Costa Rica, Australia, Greeland, Colorado, Japan (called onsen, and Beppu is the onsen capital of the country)… pretty much anywhere there was once volcanic activity has some seriously soothing hot springs nearby.

Baths

For the whole experience — sauna, steam, tepid, cold and hot baths, massage, scrub — head to a full-on bath… Italian thermae, Turkish hammam (also to be found in places like Paris and London) or Russian bathhouse. It’s nice-to-have in the summer, but a must-have lifesaver in the winter, when skin is dry, spirits are down and you just can’t shake the winter blues.

If your skin and hair need yet more hydration, turn to the Indian trick of massaging coconut oil into your hair at night (wrapping in an old towel or shirt before your head hits the pillow), the Japanese trick of using camellia oil for everything from a cleanser to split ends, Korean kukui nut oil on dry skin or even a New Zealand manuka honey (a well-known humectant) body butter.

What are your favourite winter-friendly beauty traditions from around the globe? We want to hear! Not least of all because we’ll be adding them to our list of must-do activities until the temperature rises again.