Now, more than ever, we all want to feel our best — a fact reflected in verifiably booming beauty and wellbeing industries. While there’s no doubt research and development is taking longer to make its way around the globe, despite the pandemic there’s no stopping progress. Issues like climate change and societal shifts like increasingly blurred gender stereotypes are reflected in today’s beauty landscape, which, thankfully, is only becoming more inclusive. From the latest in cosmetic treatments to buzzy new product formulation techniques, expressing our individuality never looked so good.
Now grappling with the pandemic for a third year, the wellbeing sector has only ballooned as we seek mental and physical reprieve from the toll of life’s stresses. On a positive note, stigma around subjects like menstruation and menopause is also noticeably lifting, and the sexual wellness industry is well and truly booming.
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Snack Session
You may have heard the term “exercise snack”, but we’re not talking about food here. It refers to short, sharp workouts, the rise of which is set to continue this year. Well-known American fitness entrepreneur Joe Holder is an enthusiastic proponent of short workouts, espousing the many benefits, including the fact that they’re easier to fit into your day, they build up and contribute to overall fitness, and they’re great for increasing mobility.
Pleasure Seekers
A marked trend in 2021, the global sexual wellness market has everyone hot under the collar, and it’s only projected to grow with Research And Markets estimating it will be worth USD$125 billion by 2026. Much of the expansion has been women-led, with female business owners redefining the space to celebrate pleasure as a form of self-care — New Zealander Ella McLean recently launched her stylish e-commerce platform Hello Lover as a conscious, inclusive antidote to the outdated “sex shop” concept.
That Time of the Month
Far from the embarrassment many of us would have experienced in our youth, today’s openness around menstruation and period care has resulted in not only a welcome reduction of shame in young people experiencing something perfectly normal for the first time, but also the development of increasingly innovative and eco-friendly sanitary products. On TikTok, the tag #periodtok has 183.7 million views, as Gen-Z users lead the charge and the conversation.
In a similar vein but at the other end of the journey, increasing dialogue around menopause is bringing much-needed attention and understanding to something that was previously suffered through in silence by many women. In New Zealand, recently-released books This Changes Everything and Don’t Sweat It by local authors Niki Bezzant and Nicky Pellegrino respectively, are shedding light on symptoms and arming women with the tools to handle this stage of life both at home and in the workplace.
