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Pashun George and her sister grew up scratching their mother’s back before bed. Now, they charge $130 an hour for it.
In 2010, they turned the tradition into a family business, Scratcher Girls, the country’s first professional back-scratching service. Today, the three of them field appointments in their Miami spa and tour the country delivering professional back scratches.
“Now more than ever, people are in need of human touch,” says George. Though their business has recently gained traction and TikTok virality (a video of one of their express back-scratching services has 15 million views and counting), the Scratcher Girls are not an overnight success.
“My mother is the back-scratching queen,” George explains. “She had the idea for the business close to twenty years ago.” Back then, they struggled to convince clients and other businesses to take them seriously.
“There were a lot of naysayers. People wanted to put us in a sexual category, and it took a lot to separate ourselves from that,” says George. The women decided to take the narrative into their own hands. They started a YouTube channel and made wellness their niche.
“Back then, you couldn’t even show a bare back on YouTube without getting flagged,” George says. But the sisters were resilient.
“We posted consistently and made sure to focus on our mission: touch therapy. We gained over 100K followers on YouTube, and we built a following on TikTok,” she says. “We never pay for promotion or advertising. Everything has been 100 percent authentic.”
Now, the family can hardly keep up with demand. Their clients regularly fly in from places like Russia, the Philippines, and Germany for a 60-minute scratch session administered by George or a family member, all of whom have extra-long manicured nails.
A session with the scratcher sisters feels similar to a spa. Clients lie on the table, close their eyes, and listen to soothing music. But instead of intense pressure, they receive a softer, soothing touch customized to their liking. The session begins on the back but also includes the arms, neck, legs, and ankles.
“We don’t stop. We don’t break contact with a client until their time is up. It is full on, uninterrupted bliss,” says George.
The Scratcher Girls aren’t the only ones back-scratching their way to success. Spas across the country have added the service to their treatment menus, and appointments are going fast.
Luv Clifton, a Knoxville resident, wanted a professional back-scratching appointment after seeing ZenHeads Spa’s videos pop up on her TikTok For You page.
For $250, clients can enjoy the “ASMR Massage” which includes 60 minutes of constant back-tracing and hair play with jade combs, wooden chopsticks, fluffy feathers, and more.
“I was immediately sold,” says Clifton.
But getting an appointment was more difficult than she expected. Thanks to the treatment’s popularity, appointments regularly get snatched up as soon as they’re made available. Eventually, Clifton got through by adding her name to the waitlist, and the results were well worth the wait.
“I fell asleep during my session,” she says, “which is normally hard for me.”
Alyssa Coulter, founder of ZenHeads Spa, has been practicing massage therapy for the past four years. She introduced the ASMR Massage to her treatment menu last year in an effort to expand her services.
“Being a massage therapist, your body is your work,” she explains, “The amount of money you can make is really limited by how much power your body can put out. We were looking for other low effort modalities that would be easier on our bodies.”
At the same time, she started seeing ASMR videos on social media. The acronym stands for automated sensory meridian response, better known as the tingles you feel when you watch someone typing on a keyboard or hear rain drops on a tin roof. (ASMR triggers can be both audio and visual.) Coulter figured she could recreate some of the ASMR techniques commonly used on social media—like hair play and dry brushing—in the treatment room.
Then, in 2024, Coulter started creating ASMR videos of her own. And like the Scratcher Girls, most of her clients now find her through social media. Without it, she says, she might not have gotten through to the “right” people: Her regular massage clients weren’t interested in a professional back-scratch, she says.
Rebecca Benvie, founder of WhisperWave Spa in New York City, which exclusively offers ASMR oriented services like soft whispers and gentle tracing, experienced something similar when she opened her doors in 2024.
“Honestly, there’s been a huge cultural shift from when I started [last year] to now,” she says. “People were shy and even borderline embarrassed to be seeking out the service when I first started. It felt like there was something fundamentally embarrassing about wanting to be touched in a nurturing way.”
Today, one of Benvie’s most popular treatments is “Just Here for the Back Rubs” which promises a full hour of gentle hairbrushing, back-tracing, and light scratching for $150.
The obvious benefit is relaxation, but Coulter believes it is deeper than that.
“The more we learn about massage we learn that therapists are interacting as much with the nervous system as we are with actual soft tissue and muscle,” she explains, “So if you can be relaxed in any way, even by light, gentle touch, that can do just as much good for your body for your pain as a deep tissue massage.”
Morayo Adisa, MD, a double board-certified dermatologist and dermatopathologist based in Chicago, also sees the value. “Back-scratching, if performed by a trained professional in a clean, regulated facility with clean tools, and with the appropriate scratch intensity, can be comforting and stress-relieving,” she says, adding that the practice can “[boost] the production of endorphins and dopamine and promote blood circulation.”
More specifically, says Tiffany Libby, MD, a double board-certified dermatologist and MOHS surgeon based in Providence, RI, back-scratching (or any type of soft, stroking motion) activates the C-fibers in our central nervous systems which then "activates the part of the brain that is associated with comfort.”
“It comes down to [the feeling of] safety,” says Katie Schloss, a licensed social worker based in Chicago. “When little kids are learning how to walk, they'll look back at their primary caregiver to make sure that it's safe for them to continue. Adults getting these back scratches is kind of the same thing. They no longer have their mom, sister, or friend to scratch their back so they're seeking it elsewhere in the world.”
And for some clients, that feeling is worth the triple-digit price tag.
“It does pain me a little to pay an obscene price to have someone play with my hair,” says Laura Vandergriff, a client of Coulter and a mom to twins. “Listen, I live in a house full of boys. No one is going to play with my hair, so if I have to pay this woman to tickle me, so be it!”
Vandergriff says she doesn’t regularly treat herself to wellness services, so she figures this option is as good as anything else: “I work a desk job. I have bad posture. When I get a massage, I want them to treat a problem; it doesn’t necessarily feel relaxing. I just want to pay someone to tickle my back.”
Similarly, Angela Mastantuono, a high school English teacher in southern California, used to treat herself to a monthly massage, but ever since she discovered the Soft Touch Spa in Los Angeles, she can’t go back.
“When somebody scratches your back or plays with your hair, you never want them to stop. At the end of every session, I book my next appointment,” says Mastantuono. “Now, I go every month religiously.”
Julie Luther, the founder of Soft Touch, can relate. "As a child, one thing that could always calm me down and get me to sleep was a back-scratch from my mom,” she says. “Some people are looking to fill a void. I feel honored to help fill that space for them.”
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