Wellness culture has lost the plot
Natural Beauty, doxycycline, and my exhausting "self-care" quest to feel better.
Wellness is a soon-to-be $9 trillion industry, but I’m no closer to feeling better.
Every time I open Instagram or YouTube (too tired for Twitter or TikTok), I'm bombarded with videos of people’s self-care and wellness practices: Sunday resets1, elaborate skincare routines, gym sessions in matching workout sets, tranquil spa days. Even more inescapable are the ads (more on that later).
A modern concept of “self-care” emerged in the 2010s in social media posts and on the impulse-buy shelves that buttress the Target checkout line. The newer self-care and wellness culture is consistently criticized because it’s severed from its radical roots, as argued in texts like A Burst of Light by Audre Lorde. It’s often seen as a temporary fix, or even an enabler, of a systemic problem, and many of us are familiar with this notion. And yet, the wellness culture we’re seeing now, especially online, feels like it’s reached an absurd new level of ubiquity.
Thanks to trends like “morning shed” for the wellness that must happen as soon as you wake up, and ads for products like “mouth tape,” for the wellness that you must do while you sleep, self-care is a full-time job. It's a productivity metric. And unless you’re doing self-care at the highest possible level, you’re failing yourself. How could that level of pressure possibly be empowering? The self-care industrial complex is in full swing online, and it's having an impact on people's lives offline. Just logging off is no longer an option, and self-care is no longer a break from the grind — it is the grind, and it’s inextricable from Western standards of beauty.
Question: What do the words “cortisol-lowering, dreamy pistachio matcha latte” mean to you?
Nothing? Same. But what about “face yoga?” Or “faux-zempic?” Or “Nespresso coffee capsules enriched with vitamin B12?”
These are just some of the many wellness products recently marketed to me on Instagram. Once I started noticing the pattern, I started taking screenshots, which must have told the app that I wanted more of its slop (my friend Jared called this “hate-fucking the algorithm) and the ads got more and more absurd2:
A man lifts an overjoyed woman into the air. The text “That feeling when you get your hands on all-natural faux-zempic” is overlayed on them. It’s an ad for some kind of supplement that promises to make you skinny and help you find a husband, I guess.
“HOW TO DEBLOAT IN UNDER AN HOUR + For face & belly! Yesterday for dinner I had 3 bowls of pasta,” says the text on a video of a woman pulling down her bike shorts to reveal flat abs. This is also an ad for a supplement—same company as the first.
A blonde woman puts on a crewneck with a picture of Elmo in the clouds; the text on the sweater says, “Love Yourself.” The caption on the video for this streetwear brand announces “the Sesame Street mental health collection.”
A different blonde woman puts a piece of tape in the shape of an exaggerated pout on her lips, then smizes at the camera. The video tells me that going to bed with mouth tape will improve my sleep and give me a sharper jawline.
Yet another blonde woman pours soap into a giant bowl full of colourful plastic hair claws. The caption says, “Instead of thinking about him, go wash your hairclips.” Not sure if this was an ad for the soap or hair clips in general? Also, am I supposed to wash my hair clips?
A brunette woman (diversity win!) tries on a Skims bra with built-in nipples. As the fake nips stare into my soul from inside the woman’s tight t-shirt, she says, “We all know nipples are in.” WHAT DOES THAT MEAN???
In short, the wellness industry has fully jumped the shark. Influencers are selling consumerism through the Trojan horse of wellness or empowerment (often co-opting feminist, anti-racist, and medical language), in order to sell products that reinforce the very problems they claim to subvert.
I am fucking tired of pretending like I have my shit together, but it feels like it’s an imperative. I sense a relentless pressure to optimize every part of my body and mind, even though I know that self-care is all smoke and mirrors.
I made an appointment with a naturopath, who told me to sleep more and eat protein.3 Okay… who is cooking three meals a day with 30g of protein unless it’s their literal job? But for a short while, seeing the naturopath did make me want to try harder to sleep and eat better. I might have been able to keep going if I had more checkpoints with the naturopath, but my insurance coverage for naturopathy ran out after three appointments, and I can’t afford to pay out of pocket.
I went to see a dermatologist, thrilled to get an appointment within three weeks instead of waiting the usual three to six months it takes to see a derm in Ontario. She prescribed doxycycline for my persistent hormonal acne and rosacea, a low-dose antibiotic that I later learned only reduces your acne as long as you’re actively taking it. I’m not sure what I’ll do in two months after my prescription expires.
I deleted social media, most games, and all the streaming apps from my phone in a desperate attempt to lower my screen time. I’d developed a terrible habit of playing Candy Crush (yes, in the year of our lord 2025) or scrolling Instagram for hours while Netflix or Disney Plus droned on in the background. A chorus of influencer-isms, like “run, don’t walk…” and “trying the new viral xyz,” combined with the familiar sounds of TV reruns, had reached a maddening crescendo in my head. I’ve weaned myself off Instagram and Candy Crush, but now, I sometimes play 8 Ball Pool on my phone. And sometimes I check Instagram on my phone’s internet browser.4
In the book Natural Beauty, Ling Ling Huang’s twenty-something narrator, a lapsed piano prodigy, starts a new job working at Holistik. Holistik is Huang’s brilliant creation, a beauty and wellness company that I can only describe as the demonic love child of Goop and Othership. It’s a barely disguised cult set in a near-future dystopian world of body modification. Actually, it’s not even a near future. I often think about Kim Kardashian claiming she would literally eat her own poop everyday if it made her beautiful.
Throughout the book, at first slowly and then so quickly that she doesn’t recognize herself in the mirror, Natural Beauty’s narrator optimizes everything about her appearance. She dutifully consumes her job-mandated pills and potions (some made with actual snake venom) until they consume her, stealing everything from her Asian features to her memories. She becomes a blond-haired, blue-eyed, slim-nosed automaton shilling Holistik’s expensive regimens to the store’s desperate customers while wholeheartedly believing in its mission to make everything beautiful. Something dark and wretchedly sad still lurks just under her beautiful new skin.
“Customers who are fully satisfied require no further satisfaction. They must be sold a version of themselves that is constantly just out of reach.”
— Natural Beauty, Ling Ling Huang
Of course, it all goes too far for our narrator, and you’ll have to read the book to find out just how far.5 And yet, I found myself thinking, “If beauty and serenity were really in a pill, I would probably take it.” Natural Beauty struck me because of how well it imagined the lengths women go to for beauty and wellness, and how it’s never enough. The only acts of self-care that made the narrator feel at peace were opening her heart to a woman who truly cared about her and returning to playing the piano. I wonder how I would feel if I stopped trying to optimize this life and just spent more time reading, writing, and being honest with my friends and family beyond the surface of my emotions.
In the Global Wellness Institute’s 2024 report, a claim stood out to me: "The wellness economy continues to march forward at a brisk pace, despite a decline in global wellbeing on many fronts." It’s an unabashedly evil sentence. People are struggling all over the world, but the money’s still flowing.
So… if the wellness industry is booming while we're all in the trenches, who is all this even for?
What would it look like if we actually rested — if wellness wasn’t something we could shop for or scroll through?
Maybe my journey towards wellness begins not in a product or a practice, but in the quiet defiance of wellness culture itself.
Maybe what I need to do is nothing at all.
How does everyone in a Sunday reset video own a Dyson vacuum?
Every single one of these examples is a real ad, and I have so many more.
The naturopath also said saffron extract helps with depression. If kesar really was the cure for my life-long malaise, my Indian ass would not be neurodivergent.
I cannot stress how much we all need to delete Instagram. Even just removing the app from my phone has put me in a better, more focused mindset.
Please look up the content warnings for Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang if you decide to read it. Even though it’s a great read, it’s not an easy one.
