Wellness has rooted firmly into the beauty industry as consumers lean into rituals, products, treatments and procedures for a variety of wellbeing needs. And it’s a space that will continue to gain significant ground as longevity science evolves, wellness tourism builds, and new technologies emerge.
“Wellness has really changed in the last few years, since the pandemic,” said Rina Raphael, journalist and author of The Gospel of Wellness. “For a very long time, starting around 15 years ago, wellness was treated a lot like fashion: every six months, there were things coming out – kombucha, sea moss.”
Now, Raphael said consumers are far more savvy and “want to see the science and experts” behind products and treatments. Businesses looking to get involved, therefore, must proceed with this in mind, given wellness can now be backed by “real” albeit “emerging” longevity science.
“I’m really excited about it now because I see a much smarter consumer,” she told attendees during a panel session at Cosmoprof Worldwide Bologna. “Even our influencers have changed; there are so many experts, cosmetic scientists, doctors. It’s a sophisticated market with a wiser consumer and a lot of science-backed opportunities.”
Beauty and wellness “now synonymous”
Roseanna Roberts, director of trend foresight at The Estée Lauder Companies, said wellness definitely needs to be on the agenda in beauty today.
“Beauty and wellness are now synonymous. If you are a beauty brand, you have to be thinking about how you’re going to integrate wellness; and there are so many different avenues you can go down,” Roberts said. Companies can develop new products targeting different wellness needs like sleep, mood, mental health and sensorial, for example, or simply re-think existing product line positioning, she said.
Beyond this, partnerships may also work for some companies. “Not all brands are necessarily going to build product around this. So, who can you partner with? Is there somebody that makes sense?” Finding the right partner is absolutely key, she said, particularly one that embodies the same values as your beauty brand.
One area beauty brands could lean into partnerships is wellness tourism – a burgeoning category worldwide.
Eat, sleep, treat, repeat
“Wellness travel used to be all about spas and relaxation but now we’re starting to see that it’s more about procedures, treatments and getting diagnosed,” said Yarden Horwitz, co-founder of US research firm Spate. Consumers today, Horwitz said, are travelling all over the world for aesthetic procedures, beauty treatments and overall wellbeing time.
Alena Stavnjak, corporate director of spa at luxury hotel chain Starwood Hotels, said there has certainly been a clear shift in traveller priorities, with focus now on “prevention”. People want to manage things like sleep, energy, hormones and ageing and they expect access to diagnostics, products, procedures, tools and spaces to fulfil this, Stavnjak said. Starwood Hotels, therefore, is adding a lot of tech-forward and touchless services to its resorts, including meditation pods and cryo-therapy spaces. “We’re incorporating more and more of the wellness aspect into our resorts,” she said, with different packages also centred around various needs, such as biohacking, recovery and mindfulness.
And there are clear opportunities for beauty brands here too, the director said, as hotels look to partner with clinics and skin care brands to offer the wellness treatments people are looking for.
Tech-led vs. experiential wellness
Roberts said optimisation via advanced tech is an exciting space when considering the future of wellness. “I’m excited about the future of optimisation. We’re kind of just at the beginning of this transformation of technology that will be able to help us live longer (…) looking better while we’re doing it. There’s a lot of innovation to come and it’s a really exciting time for wellness.”
Mallory Huron, director of beauty and wellness at US trend agency Future Snoops, said that whilst tech-led wellness remains important, sometimes the cumulation of tracking so many aspects of health becomes “overwhelming” for consumers. There are, therefore, opportunities to offer something a bit different, Huron said.
“The social side of longevity is deeply, deeply overlooked,” she told attendees during a different panel session at Cosmoprof Worldwide Bologna. “No-one is thinking of longevity from the perspective of spending time with friends, laughing, socialising, and yet the data is there to prove it makes you live longer.” People are also increasingly seeking “sensorial detoxes” where they are taking time away from technologies and stress.
What brands can look to do, therefore, is offer “more experiential, gentle, biohealing and less biohacking”, Huron said. For beauty products, she said it will be important to present science-backed results with “holistic healing” messages. “You can be clinically water-tight, super reliable, trustworthy and amazing, but sometimes if you lean into that too much, consumers will think of you as a clinical brand. You might want to lean more into sensorial healing and wellness aspects.”
