The Red-Hot Sauna Industry Is Boiling Over With New Ways To Optimize Your Sweat Session

Sweat, meet tech.

For centuries, saunas have been spaces for sweating it out—but the sauna of the future is proving to be so much more than a hot box. While in-spa and at-home saunas have long featured dry heat (via wood, coals, or electricity) or infrared heat (through electromagnetic energy), the next wave of saunas will layer on additional features. Among them are red light therapy (which uses a shorter wavelength of red light than infrared, typically to reduce inflammation in skin treatments); pulsed electromagnetic field therapy, or PEMF therapy (a non-invasive therapy that mimics the Earth’s natural magnetic energy to improve circulation); and cryotherapy, or cold therapy (which has also been shown to increase circulation when used alongside heat, á la contrast bathing). Such sauna tech innovations will increase the potential benefits we can reap from a sweat session—and improve our user experience in the process.

The main sauna innovations are showing up in the layering of modalities. “Tech stacking is going to be a thing in the sauna space,” says Lauren Dovey, founder of the sauna and wellness brand Heat Healer. In September, Heat Healer launched the latest version of its at-home sauna, the Energy Sauna ($2,498), with its “Triple-Threat Technology”—a combination of infrared heat, red light, and PEMF. (It’s already sold out and is being restocked in mid-December.) Representatives from consumer home brands HigherDose and Plunge shared that they, too, expect to launch sauna products in 2024 that allow for the use of multiple modalities at once.

These launches reflect the next dimension of an already red-hot sauna market, which was valued at $238 million in 2021 and is expected to grow 8 percent annually, hitting $382 million by 2027. It’s a growth trajectory that Lee Braun, CEO of the sauna franchise Perspire Sauna Studio, has witnessed firsthand: The brand opened its first studio in 2010 and hit one million sessions in 2021; but in just two additional years, it reached an additional million sessions. And the growth is showing no signs of slowing: Perspire began 2023 with 29 studios and will end it with 50, and Braun says he plans to double that number by the end of 2024.

All this growth expands on a legacy of sauna tradition. “Humans have been using heat therapy and saunas for thousands of years to fight illness,” says Braun. The earliest recorded evidence of sauna usage dates back to around 7,000 years ago in what is now modern-day Finland. Over time, as cultures evolved, so too did the concept of the sauna. Different regions developed their own variations, such as the Turkish hammam, the Russian banya, and the Native American sweat lodge, each of which is historically associated with a version of detoxification or purification on top of unique cultural and social significance.