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Thick paste is painted across my face as I lie in bed wearing only white underpants. Strange fingertips beat out a tune around my eyes before kneading my skin with the tough love of a wrinkled aunt pinching a child's cheeks. The feeling is both familiar and disconcerting.

After being quizzed on my skin condition - Do I suffer from crow's feet? Dry skin? Or, more mysteriously, labial folds? - I am led into a small, white room and my eyes covered with damp gauze. I can smell eucalyptus burning and hear a car alarm blaring above the dull hum of relaxation music. I feel something warm and silky being massaged into my scalp and chest before I drift asleep in the hands of a woman whose name I barely know.

There is a curious comfort in the touch of a qualified stranger. Lying on that bed I am physically vulnerable and exposed, despite the strategic low lighting and the availability of ample "modesty" towels. And yet I feel sufficiently at ease to doze through half of my hour-long facial. When I do eventually stir, I am gripped by the sudden fear I have been purring out loud.

An entire industry of touch has grown from this desire to be cared for, groomed or cleaned by others. Massages, manicures, pedicures and facials were once the spoils of the idle rich or rare indulgences. But, increasingly, professional touching has moved into the mainstream, into that ever bulging band of contemporary "needs" - along with house cleaners, stylists, personal shoppers and dog walkers. A whole new service economy is booming on the expectation that women, and increasingly men, should put their personal care in the hands of others. It's like welcoming cleaners into our homes once a week to vacuum, mop and iron - except now we are outsourcing the care of our own bodies.

Marc Cohen, professor of complementary medicine at RMIT University, says touch has become something we prefer to leave in the hands of professionals, rather than to risk offence by inappropriately touching a colleague or peer in public. "Touch is a basic human need and, without it, we suffer from skin hunger," he says. "But there are all these taboos around touch in our society. You can get a sexual harassment charge if you touch someone the wrong way. In some societies, you will see men walk around with their arms around each other or going hand-in-hand, but, in Australia, you just don't see that. We do live in a very low-touch society."

Cohen says massages, manicures, pedicures and waxes have become, in part, a symptom of such urban isolation; of people growing increasingly beyond the reach of each other. "We have a whole industry that has built up around providing touch and connections," he says. "We all feel isolated sitting at home watching our TVs, disconnected from the people even in the same room as us."

Somewhere along the way, beauticians, masseuses, waxers and aestheticians also became part healer, doctor, confessor and shrink. Angela Della Penna, a beauty therapist at Toorak's Beautiful salon, says clients often cry over their problems when they come to see her. "I know marriage details, affairs, problems they are having with their children," she says.

"You're in a room by yourself with this person, you're touching them, you're getting close, and you've created a scene where they want to talk, they want to let it out. Sometimes I think they've come back more just to talk to me. I had one this morning who cried because she had some building problems at her home. I'm doing her pedicure and she's tearing up and saying, 'It just feels so good to talk to you'."

Della Penna says she can tell the moment a client walks in the door whether they are more interested in being massaged or simply engaged. One time a male client was interested in something else altogether: he stripped naked and lay uncovered and face up on the bed, looking at her intently, before she told him to put his pants back on and wrapped up the massage in quick time.

Della Penna has to be part-professional and part-performance artist, spending hours in a private room bent over near-naked clients while trying to keep her distance. "I never make eye contact when I am massaging someone because it can get a little awkward," she says. "It's a very intimate situation and you are dealing with people who have come in off the street that you may not know. They're not my friend, you know. I switch off. I put all my energy into it but I'm there to do my job."

Playing such a demanding role is also physically taxing. Della Penna sees a chiropractor every three months for muscle spasms in her lower back. Many beauticians also suffer from repetitive strain injury, and get dermatitis on their hands, triggered by chemicals and oils.

At $20 an hour, slightly above the award rate for an experienced beauty therapist, Della Penna has plenty of work to keep her hands busy. Every city street is busy with people, all trying desperately not to bump into each other. Instead they increasingly seek their touch elsewhere, from the $35 shopping-centre pedicure (including parking validation), to the five-star day spas.

Victoria's touch industry has boomed to about 3500 beauty salons and hairdressers, which employ more than 8000 people, according to the Hairdressing and Beauty Industry Association. In the past five years, the number of day spas across the country has more than doubled to 500. And in the past decade, the percentage of people employed in massage therapy has more than tripled, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Meanwhile, online Yellow Pages searches for beauty salons jumped 37% and for day spas by almost 75% in the five years to 2006.

In a single block on Little Collins Street alone are five different salons and spas. I stop in at the Rakis Geisha Spa, which is Japan-chic with rice-paper doors and kimonos, for a $95 hour-long facial. Later, after waking from my sleep and putting my clothes back on, I speak to beauty therapist Yumi Kanai, 30, about how hard it can be to touch strangers all day long.

A slight arc in the tip of her left index finger is the result of ligament damage from five days straight of massaging clients. It kept her off work for a week. She typically works about 40 hours a week at $20 an hour, and hopes her body will hold up for another decade or so.

Kanai's hands are big and strong, yet surprisingly quick and dexterous - something she discovered while folding tens of thousands of tiny medicine boxes in the factory of a pharmaceuticals company near Tokyo.

She confesses that she used to dread the thought of being touched by strangers. "I was very shy to go to massage because I didn't want to expose my skin and I was uncomfortable," she says. "We don't do that thing in Japan. Here, if I sit on a tram people say, 'Hi, how are you'. But in Japan we don't really talk to or touch strangers."

She became a beautician by chance, after searching for a career where she could make the most of her nimble hands while practising her English. But typically her clients do most of the talking - about their home life or work stresses, their sex life or lack of one. "Sometimes they want to talk to me about their relationships or marriages or their religion. Sometimes they ask me about my boyfriend but I am uncomfortable to talk about myself," she says. "It is difficult to be professional when you talk about stuff like that."

Many clients ask for her especially, as she is the only Japanese beauty therapist in a "geisha" spa. But Kanai actually learnt her trade one block away at the Melbourne campus of the Australian College of Hair Design and Beauty. There, hundreds of students, most of them young women, learn the art and profession of touching others for a living.

Recently, I sat in on part of a day spa course in a room thick with steam and the smell of burning sage oil. Playing in the corner was a CD titled Shamanic Dream, one of those interminable recordings of chants, pan pipes and wailing whales that are common to most salons.

Here, students are taught to take control with their hands, employing firm movements that leave their clients in no doubt as to what touch is appropriate and what is taboo. Elaborate rituals are rehearsed for making people feel at ease but not too comfortable with such intimacy. Naked bodies are hidden beneath white towels. Only one body part is exposed at a time: I catch a glimpse of a calf muscle, then a thigh, then an arm, but never all at once.

Touching the upper thigh area, the students learn, startles new clients, and should be avoided. At all times an appreciable distance must be observed between the beautician and her client. It is all formulaic. In any other setting, the touch of two people in such a setting might make them bold. Here, elaborate rules and regulation stamp out any whiff of intimacy.

I think about all this as I strip to my underwear for a facial and massage at the Lyall Spa in South Yarra. Spa manager Kelly Sgroi, 26, places her hands gently on my shoulders as she raises the bed to chest height. Even this is a technique to make new clients feel at ease before being touched in intimate places. "You need to start off slowly," she says. "Before a massage, you touch them over the towel; even with a facial you touch their shoulder and warn them the bed is going up so as not to startle them."

Before starting my Elemis Spa treatment - a specific touch technique developed in Britain that involves long sweeps of the skin - Sgroi mentions that she doesn't really enjoy being touched herself. "I am not even the most affectionate person, just ask my husband," she says. "I am the most modest client. I like everything covered. I have no problem working on others but I am still a bit insecure of myself."

She holds up a modesty towel so I can move from my back to my front in privacy. Each of her touches under the Elemis method must be counted out to the minute, in the same pattern with the same intensity. "I just see myself as a professional doing a job," she says. "Time is always ticking for us. You've got about 15 minutes for your small talk, to work out what you're doing for the day. So you really don't have a lot of time to gossip. There is not a huge relationship there."

Later, after I have again fallen asleep, she rings a set of tiny bells above my body to mark the end of my session, and leaves me alone in the room to dress. I feel languid and calm, but also strangely bereft. After such intimacy it feels odd to be alone again so soon.

I ask Sgroi whether she finds it peculiar to touch strangers all day long. "Sometimes I do think about it and I do find it odd," she confesses. "I catch my reflection in the splashback as I am massaging and think, 'Oh this is weird'."

The science of touch

Scientists have long studied the power of healing hands to cure what ails us. In Ohio in the late 1970s, scientists studying the link between cholesterol and heart disease, using caged rabbits, were perplexed when some of their subjects remained healthy despite a poor diet. It was eventually discovered that those same rabbits had been taken from their cages each day and petted by a sympathetic keeper. The inadvertent discovery led scientists to conclude that the simple act of touch resulted in a 60% lower incidence of clogged arteries.

Two decades earlier, a study involving caged baby monkeys found the need for touch can override even our most basic instincts. The monkeys wlpreferred a tactile, carpet-covered monkey model to a wire apparatus that provided them with food.

More recently, scientists have turned their attention to human subjects. According to the Touch Research Institute in Miami, Florida, touch has been shown to reduce anxiety, depression, stress and asthma. Other studies have shown that touch can enhance the immune system and decrease glucose levels in people with diabetes. In premature babies, touch has been found to stimulate growth and interaction.

In one study, scientists who staked out McDonald's in Paris and Miami found French adolescents touched each other more frequently during conversations and were less likely to show aggressive behaviour than their American peers. A separate study in the US found depressed adolescents who received a daily 30-minute back massage were more likely to feel better than their similarly depressed peers who spent the same amount of time each day watching DVDs.