what a gas

A BREATH of fresh air: just what Hong Kong needs. And it's now being brought to you by an Austrian entrepreneur and former hotel executive who trained as a psychologist.

Ilse Massenbauer-Strafe has just introduced this stressed-out city to the latest, hippest international health craze through oxygen bar Oxyvital, which officially opened last week.

Walk through the frosted glass doors of the neat premises on Wellington Street, Central, insulated against the interminable succession of lorries spluttering carbon monoxide, into a place that looks like a nursery school: pale blue walls, brightly coloured chairs, a curved table running down one side.

But Oxyvital is not for children ... not yet anyway. It is, as Massenbauer-Strafe describes it, 'an oasis, a place where you can just come and breathe.' Oxygen bars are not new to the US, Canada or Europe. Oxygen therapy as a natural boost to health is based on too much scientific research by credible professionals to be denounced immediately as a load of hot air. In the United States, the therapy has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a treatment for specific conditions like carbon monoxide poisoning and soft-tissue damage. And while critics say that unless you have such problems it won't do anything for you, there are those who swear by the scented 'fix' for its own sake.

You go to a place like Oxyvital, whose stocks are maintained by the same company which supplies hospitals with bottled oxygen, to sniff an oxygenated cocktail - in almost any fruity flavour you want. But not before you sign a disclaimer stating that you have neither emphysema nor chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. And you can't be pregnant either.

Customers are handed a hot towel and asked by Massenbauer-Strafe, or one of her non-medically trained employees, how they feel.