The forty-five who practise it in Amsterdam

The cards above give you faces and a few lines apiece, which is the first part of the decision and the least useful. A photograph cannot show weight. It cannot tell you whether a woman’s forearm is as articulate as her hand, or whether the eleventh minute of a stroke carries the same attention as the second. Those are the things that decide a nuru hour, and no portrait has ever held them.

What the gel asks of her

Gel removes friction, and friction is where a masseuse ordinarily reads a body, the small resistance that tells her how hard she is pressing. Take it away and she must judge pressure from breathing, from the set of a shoulder, from whatever she can see, and keep judging it while sustaining a stroke that is not permitted to stop. That is the whole difficulty of the technique. It is also why the good ones work from the forearms, the back and the length of the body, not the hands alone: hands tire well inside twenty minutes, and an hour finds out anyone who has not learned to spread the effort. Stamina and patience, in that order, and then the willingness to hold an unhurried tempo long after the novelty has worn off.

Forty-five women are listed here. Each photograph shows the woman whose profile carries it and was taken with her agreement; when a woman leaves the roster, her page and her pictures are taken down. All of them are twenty-one or over. Neither figure tells you much about how an hour will go, which is why they sit at the end of a paragraph rather than the top of a page.

How to choose

There are two workable ways. Choose a face, send her name, and you will be told plainly whether she is free tonight. Or describe the evening you have in mind, the technique, the length, whether there will be two of you, and the reply will list who is available that night and offers that technique, which a thread can tell you and a photograph cannot. For four hands, ask early; some pairs have worked together long enough to share a rhythm, and they are worth waiting an hour for.

Choosing a nuru massage therapist in Amsterdam from her profile

Each card opens onto a page of her own, and that page carries more than the grid has room for. There you will find the languages she works in, her height, the part of the city she lives in and the techniques she offers, alongside a set of photographs. Of those, languages tend to be the most useful. Every woman here speaks English, and a French speaker such as Banks, or a Ukrainian and Russian speaker such as Bonnie, can make the evening easier for a guest who would rather not spend it in a second language.

Her home district is worth less than it looks. Jordaan, De Pijp, Oud-Zuid or the centre, it changes nothing about how quickly she reaches you, since forty to sixty minutes holds across the whole of the ring. Height matters slightly more for nuru and body to body than for other massage, because the glide is carried along the length of her body, but it remains a preference rather than a requirement, and either answer works.

Pairs, return visits and second evenings

For four hands nuru, ask for a pair instead of choosing two names separately. Some of the women have worked side by side often enough to share a tempo without discussing it, and those are the pairings worth asking about first. If you have booked someone before and would like her again, simply give her name; a second evening with the same therapist begins from whatever she learned about you on the first. And if you are still weighing up one therapist against two, that question has a short piece of its own.

Availability shifts through the night. The grid shows everyone on the roster rather than who is free this minute, so the fastest route is to name two or three women you like and let the reply tell you which of them can come.