Basalt Day Spa

Address: 402 East Harvey Milk Boulevard

Telephone: 801-532-2991

Website: basaltdayspa.com

District: Liberty Wells

 

“It genuinely is just about caring for people.” For Amber DeVoge and Jasmine Percy, the women behind Basalt Day Spa, those words reach far beyond massage, facials, or beautiful skin. They speak to something the two have been building together for more than a decade - a place centered on human connection, thoughtful care, and the belief that, for an hour or two, everything outside its doors can simply be left behind.

Long before Basalt, both women found their way into the spa world remarkably young. Jasmine was raised in Sandy, Utah, in a family where the mountains and creativity were woven into everyday life. Her father was an avid skier, and weekends were often spent at Snowbird. Her mother was an artist, filling Jasmine’s childhood with creative pursuits, but she also was part of the second graduating class of Myotherapy College of Utah in the 1980s. Jasmine grew up receiving massages from her mother and absorbing an appreciation for wellness almost without realizing it. “That is where I got my woo-woo side,” she laughs.

Ready to move on from high school, Jasmine graduated early in 1999 and enrolled in massage school. By the time she would otherwise have completed her senior year, she had finished her massage training and was beginning classes at the University of Utah. There was only one place she wanted to work.

Breathe Day Spa had opened in Salt Lake at a time when Jasmine remembers there being nothing else quite like it. “It was just magic,” she says. She worked there as a massage therapist throughout college while earning a degree in organizational communication with a minor in sociology. It was also where she met Amber. 

Amber had grown up in Taylorsville. Much of Amber’s childhood was spent outdoors - digging in the dirt, searching for roly-polies beneath rocks, riding bikes, swimming, and camping with her family. She remembers always wanting to be around people, whether friends or family, an inclination that would eventually prove every bit as important to her career as skincare itself.

Her introduction to aesthetics came unexpectedly. As a teenager, Amber did some modeling and struggled with her skin. One day, a makeup artist suggested she see an aesthetician, a profession Amber had never even heard of. She was given the name of Susan Tullis, the original owner of Skinworks School of Advanced Skincare. After years of visiting makeup counters and dermatologists without finding much relief, Amber began having facials with Susan and, for the first time, saw her skin improve. One day, lying on Susan’s treatment table, she asked how someone learned to do what she did. That conversation changed everything.

Amber graduated from Taylorsville High School in 1998 and almost immediately enrolled in aesthetic school. At first, she simply wanted to understand her own skin better. But as she learned, another possibility emerged. “Someone had helped me,” she remembers, “and I thought, I can actually help people in the way that someone helped me.” She began working almost immediately, first renting a small space of her own and then taking a position at Snowbird. The resort gave her an extraordinary amount of hands-on experience very quickly - treatment after treatment during the busiest ski season - but it also showed her what she did not want, as there was little time to build relationships with clients.

When Breathe contacted her in 1999, she began working there as well, at one point completing six treatments at Snowbird, driving down the canyon, changing clothes, and doing several more at Breathe that evening. Eventually, the relationships won out. Amber left the seasonal resort work behind and made Breathe her home.

Her role continued to grow. Amber managed the aesthetics department, helped develop treatments and service menus, worked with retail displays and, beginning around 2004, became an educator for Dermalogica, traveling throughout Utah to schools and skincare businesses. After her daughter was born in 2005, Amber gradually returned to working independently, first from a beautifully renovated space in her home and later from private studios around Salt Lake.

All the while, Jasmine remained in her orbit. After college, Jasmine had left full-time massage behind and spent nearly a decade building a career in advertising and marketing, first with local agencies and eventually with the global firm McCann Erickson. She enjoyed much of the work along the way, but corporate life increasingly felt removed from what she wanted. And so, one day, she found herself back on a treatment table - this time receiving a facial from Amber. “I’m so burned out,” Jasmine remembers telling her. “I can’t do this anymore. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” She mentioned that she had always dreamed of owning a spa. Amber looked at her and said she had too.

A conversation during a facial quickly became weekly meetings, a business plan, and a shared realization that their years together at Breathe had left them with a remarkably similar idea of what a spa could be. When Jasmine was subsequently laid off from McCann - complete with severance - the timing felt almost too perfect. The women began small, sharing a private studio where Jasmine offered massage and Amber performed facials. Then, one of Jasmine’s and Amber’s longtime clients, Kathia Dang, who was developing a new building on the Milk Block, asked whether they had ever considered something larger. They happened to have a business plan ready.

Basalt Day Spa opened in 2015 with three treatment rooms and two owners doing everything themselves. They greeted clients, locked the front door while treatments were underway, reopened it for the next arrival, checked people out, and started all over again. Slowly, they hired their first employees and built the business one person at a time. Today, Basalt has roughly thirty employees, including massage therapists, aestheticians and a front desk and spa team, and is open seven days a week. Several employees have been with them for over a decade.

The spa itself has grown as well. On their first day reopening after the COVID shutdown, Jasmine and Amber learned that an adjacent tenant was retiring and the neighboring space would become available. It was hardly the most reassuring moment to expand a business, but they jumped in anyway. The additional space gave Basalt five treatment rooms, including two designed for wet treatments with private tiled showers.

From the welcoming entrance to the subtle fragrance that accompanies the walk upstairs, Basalt unfolds gradually. There are carefully curated shelves filled with skincare, candles, robes, jewelry, and wellness products. Just down the hall are the treatment rooms themselves - quietly luxurious spaces where Amber even designed floating slatted wood ceilings so clients lying on their backs would have something warm and beautiful above them. An unexpected bonus is the soft pattern of shadows they cast across the walls.

Even the name connects directly to the treatments. Basalt stones are volcanic rocks capable of retaining heat, and they are central to the spa’s signature Basalt Stone Massage, which Jasmine designed. Heated stones are incorporated throughout the treatment, including a spinal layout paired with chilled marble stones, aromatherapy, and elements of chakra balancing. Their chosen oils evoke the mountains and forest, with notes including cypress and sage. “It makes you feel like you are taking a journey,” Amber says.

For clients seeking something more targeted, Basalt also offers deep tissue and therapeutic massage, while its body treatments include both detoxification and exfoliation experiences. The Detox begins with full-body dry brushing, followed by Dead Sea mud and linens soaked in an herbal detoxifying tea. While the body is wrapped, the therapist performs massage to the head, neck, scalp, and face. After showering in the treatment room, the client returns to a freshly prepared table for an application of remineralizing cream from Iceland’s Blue Lagoon, rich in minerals and microalgae. Basalt is the only spa in Utah carrying the Blue Lagoon products.

The Exfoliate treatment also begins with dry brushing, followed by a full-body scrub using products from Glycelene, an organic, vegan skincare company Basalt also carries exclusively in Utah. Depending upon the treatment, ingredients include crushed bamboo, rose quartz, French clay, and citrus sage. After showering, clients return to the table for a moisturizing body care and massage.

Facials are equally individualized. Basalt’s aestheticians examine the skin, talk with each client about concerns and goals, and customize treatments accordingly. The team continually trains in new techniques and has added enhancements including dermaplaning and nano-infusion while deliberately remaining focused on holistic skincare rather than injectables.

Education has always been one of the spa’s central pillars. Jasmine and Amber attend industry conferences, take classes, seek out new products and, whenever possible, experience other spas themselves. “There’s education in receiving, too,” Amber says. Products they encounter while traveling sometimes find their way home to Salt Lake, but not easily as both women are adamant that they will not compromise simply to introduce something new.

That philosophy extends to Basalt’s retail boutique. The goal is not simply to sell skincare, but to allow clients to continue caring for themselves once they leave. The shelves mix professional skincare with local jewelry and body products, candles, kimono-style robes, essential-oil diffusers, eucalyptus shower sprays, dry brushes, and massage tools for relieving tension at home. There are heated lavender and eucalyptus neck wraps from Sonoma Lavender - a product the women have personally used for decades - as well as LED masks, microcurrent devices, at-home dermaplaning tools, collagen masks, and books. “We wanted to create Basalt how we would want it as therapists working here, but also how we would want it as clients visiting the spa,” Jasmine explains.

That dual perspective is perhaps what distinguishes Basalt most clearly. They have kept the spa intimate as Amber never forgot the pace of her resort days when clients arrived one after another and relationships were difficult to form. At Basalt, there is time to talk, to recommend products, to remember someone from a previous visit and, sometimes, simply to listen.

The same philosophy shapes their team. Massage therapists and aestheticians are employees rather than independent contractors because Jasmine and Amber wanted everyone to work within a shared Basalt culture. Individual therapists bring their own gifts and styles, but the level of care should remain consistent. Their rule is wonderfully uncomplicated - treat others the way one would want to be treated. That applies to the client on the table as well as the coworker who will enter the treatment room next. “We realize people have a lot going on and hard things in their day,” Amber says. “But leave it at the door.” For that hour, the goal is to create a place without distraction - a place of human touch, warmth, and connection. It is a philosophy that has only deepened for Amber with time. She began her career believing skincare itself was the reason she had chosen the work. Twenty-five years later, she understands it differently. “It really has been about the people,” she says. “It’s about those connections and making a positive difference in someone’s day.”

Some clients who first came to Amber decades ago still come to Basalt today. “They’re part of my heart.” Years ago, at a skincare conference in Australia, Amber heard a speaker known as the “Master of Touch” talk about what a privilege it is to hold another person’s head in one’s hands. The thought has stayed with her since 2004. A therapist, she came to understand, receives something from the exchange too.

Although neither woman regularly performs treatments anymore - years of hands-on work have taken their toll on both of their hands and wrists - they continue to train their staff, test treatments, and occasionally step back into the treatment room. Amber says that when she does, she often leaves with an almost palpable energy. “It fills me up.”

Their partnership appears to do much the same. When Jasmine and Amber first met at Breathe, they were friendly but not inseparable. They remained part of one another’s lives, attended each other’s weddings, and maintained a mutual respect over the years, but building Basalt changed the relationship entirely.

They have now weathered children, illnesses, injuries, COVID, expansion, changing roles and the endless demands of owning a small business together. Their families have become intertwined. Amber is an aunt-like presence to Jasmine’s young children, and Jasmine is the same to Amber’s. Amber’s now twenty-one-year-old daughter works at Basalt and is preparing to enter aesthetic school herself. “We’re family,” Jasmine says. “We’re bonded for life.” The women laugh that perhaps the single greatest thing Basalt has given them is each other.

Eleven years after opening their doors, there is no sense that either has tired of what they created. Behind the calm treatment rooms and beautifully arranged shelves are two women still researching, learning, training, rearranging displays, choosing scents, evaluating products, and thinking about what might make someone’s experience just a little better. At Basalt, the most restorative treatment of all may have little to do with what is applied to the skin or how expertly a muscle is worked. It comes back to the same thing that has guided Jasmine and Amber from the beginning. “The most important thing in life is how we show up for people and how we care for people.”