Ozempic, CBD oil and a face like a push pin: ‘Wellness’ in 2023
Feeling good is eclipsing looking good: cue gummies moonlighting as a health food and spas supercharged by ‘science’.
Madonna’s Vogue turned 33 last week. The song is an anthem for empowerment, but its creator, in a cruel twist, has become a pin-up for punchlines as she, apparently, looks like a pin cushion.
“Madonna’s new face” continues to be a trending topic since the 64-year-old arrived at the Grammys this year looking “puffy” to some, “unrecognisable” to others. But for those who remember this artist – who has been breaking more moulds than novice pottery students since the 1980s – she knew it would get her in the headlines again, which comes in especially handy when you’ve got tickets for an impending world tour to sell.
Do we really think the woman who could have helped invent Invisalign to “correct” her trademark gap tooth cares about beauty trends? Remember she was into Ashtanga yoga before lulu found lemons.
Self-care for social media natives appears to be performative; for others, who lived through the 1990s in Hollywood and on runways, it’s nonchalance. While Madonna shocked the world, so too did Family Ties star Justine Bateman last week when she admitted to Vanity Fair she was a 57-year-old who had never used Botox.
“I just don’t give a shit,” Bateman said about her decision to “age naturally”, as she likes “feeling that I am a different person now than I was when I was 20”.
It’s a sentiment that Julia Fox, who was born when Vogue was charting at No.1 on the Billboard dance charts, also advocates.
The 33-year-old social media star and actor let rip in a viral rant on TikTok about the unrealistic standards women are held to.
“If I see another product that says anti-ageing on the label, I’m suing,” Fox said. “I’m going to sue because I’m gonna age regardless of if I put the f..king $500 serum on my face. And you all f..king know it, and we know it, so let’s stop lying to ourselves. Getting old is f..king hot. It is sexy.”
“Ageing is fully in. Like fully. Dirty girl, ugly, not wearing clothes that fit your body type, really just wearing anything you want. All those things are in,” she continued. “I wanna see bellies hanging over the low-rise jeans please.”
The queen of the low-rise jean – string bean supermodel Kate Moss – has traded them in for a more low-fi lifestyle. The only Coke she does now is diet. The infamous “Cocaine Kate” is dead. In 2022 she was announced as Diet Coke’s “creative director”. Welcome to the era of her sipping Stevia and promoting her own CBD-oil infused face cream via her new “restorative wellness” beauty line, Cosmoss.
“I’ve been meditating, doing yoga, just being much healthier,” she told British Vogue about her pivot. “I was taking better care of myself. I was trying new things … all of this stuff that can make you more grounded and balanced.”
While Madonna is proudly boasting more PSI than the tyres of a small sedan, the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery’s 2022 trend report echoes Fox, Bateman and Moss’s approach. Results showed the age of “Instagram face” may be over as the overindulging of hyaluronic acid fillers is decreasing.
Survey respondents reported performing 14 per cent fewer filler injections last year than they did in 2021. Meanwhile, the Aesthetic Society’s most recent trend report noted a 57 per cent spike in things like filler reversals during the past three years.
Given the predictions the global wellness industry is expected to be worth about $10 trillion by 2025, feeling good may soon eclipse looking good and we may all soon be living, loving and laughing for much, much longer.
Wellness in 2023 is all about biohacking, “optimising” everything from your brain to your sleep and charging your cells. The aim is to prioritise feeling good, over looking good. Championing prevention being better than a cure.
A new generation is now being introduced to the Chenot Method, a program launched in 1974 which aimed to heal the body through lifestyle choices. A seven-day retreat, spearheaded by Chenot’s scientific director Dr George Gaitanos, is now being offered in Switzerland that has taken the elements of good sleep and healthy diets and supercharged them. Participants now sign up for everything from cryotherapy, anti-gravity treadmills and “whole body photobiomodulation”.
We’re all familiar with mRNA thanks to reading up on Covid vaccines, and now Dr Gaitanos is extracting genetic markers (via blood test), which allows a bespoke health plan to be developed for individual guests. It also helps seek out potential future issues the body may encounter like silent inflammation or hormonal imbalance.
Ageing is also front and centre on the latest cover star of Vogue Philippines. Indigenous Filipino traditional tattooist Apo Whang-Od is the oldest person to grace a cover of the fashion magazine; she recently turned 106.
Miranda Kerr – a longtime wellness advocate – also marked a significant milestone mindfully. She celebrated her 40th birthday by releasing “the first certified organic retinol alternative”, a new serum produced by her Kora Organics beauty brand. She marked her fourth decade with a soiree for her new potion that included a goodie bag filled with silk sleeping masks and gummies made by Kourtney Kardashian.
Gummies are now a health food, ice baths are considered a luxury, and diabetics are being robbed of lifesaving drugs thanks to those snapping them up in a bid to lose weight.
Some aspects of wellness, post-pandemic, are having an identity crisis. So too are the Kardashians – the yardstick of “aspirational” body types and cosmetic trends for the better part of a decade. Last week, Khloe responded with a curt “no” to the question: “Do you miss your old face?”
Kim proudly boasted she starved herself in order to fit into Marilyn Monroe’s dress last year, while both sisters were accused of aiding and abetting the worldwide Ozempic shortage – a drug used by Type II diabetics to manage insulin resistance. The side-effects include significant weight loss.
It’s a drug which has since caught the attention of our medicines regulator. “From July 1, 2022, to just last Friday, the TGA has requested the removal of more than 1200 advertisements of Ozempic appearing on digital platforms including social media and websites,” a spokesperson for the Therapeutic Goods Administration told The Australian.
At the centre of this Venn diagram of painfully thin and “healthy” is Kourtney. She found love with Blink 182 rocker Travis Barker and married him about three times last year. The 43-year-old has since embarked on a fertility journey which saw her gain weight. Something that was picked up, and cruelly apart, online. She clapped back saying: “When I’m super skinny, just know I’m not happy.”
She is the most health conscious arm of the world’s most popular familial corporation. She is “95 per cent vegan” and lives a life akin to fellow wellness queens Kerr and Gwyneth Paltrow. She recently established her own line of supplements in gummie form called Lemme.
“Gummies that give you life, literally. Lemme is a new vitamin and supplement line developed by Kourtney Kardashian to become a divine, feel good part of your everyday life,” the website stated.
One range even claimed to help eradicate vagina odour. It was rubbished by health experts last month.
Jennifer Lopez has also promoted similar products that contain ingredients such as ashwagandha (an ancient herb used to help reduce stress), matcha tea, vitamin B12 and apple cider vinegar. They claim to help with things like sleep and weight loss but are marketed as lollies to help you “detox”, “focus” and “chill”.
The TGA has also looked into a number of these suspicious sweets. Since giving the green light to a number of brands, expect to ingest – in addition to crushed up herbs, mushrooms and minerals – things like Carnauba Wax, commonly used to make lipsticks and deodorants, as well as hypromellose, which is used in eye drops to help with the lubrication of tear ducts.
Against this backdrop, the premiere of the Netflix series Wellmania couldn’t have come at a better time. Celeste Barber – a comedian well known (and loved) for poking fun at models – has turned her attention to vegans, green juice slurpers and colonics in the adaptation of Brigid Delaney’s book of the same name. Barber stars as Liv, who has failed a medical to have her US visa renewed. She then gives herself four weeks to pass it. Her journey is never presented as the clean, soft and beautiful acts of wellness usually promoted on Instagram. It’s hilarious, sweaty and vomit-covered.
“F..k diet, f..k exercise. All I need to do is starve myself and have my colon rinsed out,” is her mantra. It’s not a motto professionals condone.
Fluidform founder and Sydney’s leading pilates practitioner Kirsten King said the extremes of the Kardashians and the Livs of the world are waning. Her clients now want to feel better, not necessarily look a certain way.
“There will always be those girls who want to be thinner, but post-pandemic people have started to really put a value on their time and health. The physical elements like standing taller, looking stronger and even your face appearing younger are just a by-product of moving in a careful, detailed and prescriptive way. Pilates rebalances not only the body but the mind.”
King, who counts a range of NRL stars and identities like designer Pip Edwards as clients, has noticed a fresh interest in pilates, or what she calls a “moving meditation”. The proof is in the expansion of Fluidform studios opening in Bondi and Rosebery in Sydney, while the online “pilates at home” platform continues to boom.
“There’s this massive cohort of people who have never moved who are moving, whether at home or back in the studio, wherever they feel comfortable,” King said. “It’s not viewed through the prism of exercise, it’s the positive impact of movement – it’s medicine.”
Maybe it’s time to do as Madonna says and not as she does: “Let your body go with the flow. You know you can do it.”