When did wellness become a status symbol?
In her new book, Amy Larocca examines how wellbeing became less a matter of universal care and more a luxury reserved for the few.
What does it really mean to be “well” in 2025—and who gets to claim that wellness? In her new book, How to Be Well, Amy Larocca dismantles the trillion-dollar industry that has made health feel both aspirational and unattainable. With clarity and precision, Larocca examines how wellness became less a matter of care and more a marker of status—sold to women as both cure and obligation.
Drawing on her background in fashion journalism, Larocca traces the eerie overlap between fashion and wellness, where everything from cold plunges to adaptogenic powders functions as a kind of new couture: coded, expensive, and exclusionary. But beneath the surface of jade rollers and bespoke supplements is something far more urgent—a society that’s increasingly offloading the burdens of systemic health failure onto the individual, particularly women, and calling it empowerment.
In How to Be Well, Larocca examines the wellness industry through a mix of reporting, historical analysis, and personal experimentation—she tries the colonics, she visits the clinics, she gets the gold ear seeds. The result is a portrait of wellness as both a coping mechanism and cultural mirror. She is especially attuned to the contradictions: that functional medicine can offer insight and promote pseudoscience; that self-care was once a radical act of resistance for women and is now a marketing slogan for bubble baths.
Here, Larocca speaks with Bazaar about the gendered pressures of self-optimisation, the political roots of wellness culture, and how the pursuit of “glow” reinforces harmful beauty standards.
You open the book with a really clear-eyed look at the wellness boom. What initially drew you to investigate that world?
My background was as a fashion editor. I wrote about the fashion industry and about style and about culture, and I started to notice that wellness was becoming—and being sold as—a luxury good. I recognised that the [marketing] techniques and the conversations around wellness were similar to what I [had experienced in] the fashion industry. I found that really intriguing, and there were so many examples of that. There was the amazing Amanda Chantal Bacon interview in Elle magazine about what she [a juice bar owner in Los Angeles] eats in a day, and it was just so much like an interview about what someone wears, where there was this esoteric language. The rise of Goop [was about sharing] this world of knowledge about things that are hard to attain. So much about fashion is about this longing for things that are hard to get.
Simultaneously, fashion was becoming democratic. You could livestream shows. You could shop online. You could have access to things that were very hard to buy before if you didn't live in a major city. While this was happening, high end wellness stuff was getting harder to get. And on a more personal level, I felt like this was something that really deeply affected my life and the lives of all the women around me.
We are talking about the commodification of something—wellness—that should really be a right for everyone. In your book, you dive into how the wellness boom originally came about because people weren't feeling served by the healthcare system in the U.S. That conversations feels especially relevant right now in an era when Medicaid is at risk and health insurance is an especially fraught topic. So within that context, what role has wellness taken on in America right now?
There are a lot of different starting places for when one in America notices how unequal and unfair and inaccessible healthcare is. So if you are a part of any sort of marginalised group, you are going to begin to notice that healthcare in America is really for the few. If you are somebody with a condition that is under-studied, you might notice that when you start going looking for answers. If you are a Black woman giving birth, you might say, “Wait, why do black women across socioeconomic levels have such higher rates of mortality in childbirth than white women?”
I think Covid was a huge inflection point for a lot of Americans. It was like, “Oh, we really do treat health like a luxury good in America; look who gets sick and look who dies when something like this happens,” because there are some pretty clear and pretty obvious lines about who is well and who is not in this country. I think that was a cold wakeup call about the results of treating healthcare like a luxury good.
You write about how at first, functional medicine was a collective pursuit, it was something that was meant for everyone and it took a look at why someone had X symptom rather than just fixing that symptom itself. How has it become something that is generally reserved for the few?
At its core, functional medicine is great. Like, why aren't we looking more at the root causes of disease? Why aren't we considering the whole person when we consider treatment? Because that's an expensive and time-consuming way of practicing medicine. You also have people who say well, what counts as functional medicine? I think most people would say nutrition counts, of course. But then what about oil pulling? You're always walking a tightrope about what does and doesn't qualify, and a lot of what's going on in this book is trying to help people figure out how to walk that tightrope and what is worth your time and your money.
There's a chapter in your book called "What about men?" that looks at why the wellness industry largely caters to women. What makes us prime targets?
Let's start with the fact that women are conditioned to feel bad about themselves and to engage in the project of self-improvement. We women are always, always, always trying to improve upon ourselves. That’s the condition of modern American womanhood: being thinner, being “better” versions of what we already are. The beauty industry already has us in the bag, right? It’s just a gentle shift. There's also the condition of women being somewhat ignored by the medical community. If you put those two things together, the conditioning and the ignoring, it’s like, yes, wellness is waiting for you. Wellness is a little bit of health and a little bit of beauty.
On that note of beauty, there's a whole chapter that looks at the concept of glow—which is about "healthy" hair, "healthy" skin, "healthy" bodies—that's basically a rebranding of beauty.
It’s basically taking all of these beauty standards and calling them something else. [Glow] is marketed as being natural but it still [feeds into] incredibly strict and stringent beauty standards. It's just that they are all internalized. The corset hasn't gone anywhere. You're just supposed to have that corset in your body, it’s an internal thing that you're supposed to create using your abdominal muscles and wear 24/7. It’s not that you don't have a corset anymore. It's that it lives in you.
The onus of wellness, if you can call it that, is often placed on the individual, but really, our elected officials and the powers that be have so much say in it. There are toxins in our water, in our air, and yet we're hyper-focused on the items we buy ourselves.
One of the illusions of wellness is that you have control over your situation. But something that’s really scary is asking, how toxic is our environment? The answer is very unknowable, except that we know that it is. I mean, a new microplastics report was just released. You want to be able to feel like you have some degree of control, but the truth is, the majority of chemical exposures that the average person experiences are not actually within your control. So to switch to a beauty product labeled “clean” is probably a very small switch, but it's something that gives you a feeling of control, a feeling of power in a world that feels very, very, very dangerous and out of control.
The chapter about the political roots of self-care is so fascinating; can you briefly walk us through where self-care came from?
As a medical term, “self-care” was initially a diagnostic tool. Is the patient able to perform super basic functions? Can the patient get themselves to the bathroom? There was a diagnostic use for the term self-care. Then it was picked up at the Black Panther clinics that were mostly around Berkeley and Oakland, California in the '60s. The idea was that the American healthcare system didn't care for Black women, specifically, and that by caring for themselves within a society that didn't care for them, self-care was a political act. It was saying, you don't care for us. We care for ourselves. Therefore, it's a defiant political act to provide health care to ourselves.
It was also used in abortion clinics and for other gynecological services that women who trained with this woman called Carol Downer [in the late '60s and '70s] were performing for each other. Obviously, abortion rights have long been fragile in this country, so women were learning how to safely perform abortions and other treatments on each other and themselves, and they were calling it self-care. Those are the roots of self-care and they’re very political. I think we can agree that it is no longer a political term. It’s used for everything now. That’s the nature of social media; it shortens the lifespan of the journey of expression and flips it on its head.
The role of social media and the wellness movement cannot be understated.
From all sides! I think wellness has been a huge recruiting tool for Q Anon.
You also connect wellness to religion in many fascinating ways. You make the point that people might be drawn to certain wellness trends like SoulCycle because in America, spirituality is declining, and people are looking for things to fill that hole.
There’s definitely a decline in organised religion, and that's been going on in America since the end of the Second World War. But people still long for a place to gather. They still long for guidance and third places and exercise studios [often] have charismatic leaders and ecstatic movement and sound and light and community and ritual. They have a lot of the markings of religious spaces and combine that with a population that no longer has that, and lonely urban life, and it's a match.
One of the more disturbing points you raise is about how some wellness trends actually encourage disordered eating or other unhealthy behaviours. How can people find the line between healthy habits and harmful obsessions?
To me, the lines are pretty clear. It's not that hard to notice when something resembles an eating disorder. I can't tell you how many people told me that their biweekly colonic cured them of an eating disorder. Like, hmm. A lot of it is really just more common sense than anything else. As soon as the word “wellness” gets attached to something, your common sense can go right out the window. But if you strip away the wellness language, it's pretty easy to figure things out.
We do know our bodies better than we give ourselves credit for. A lot of these [wellness services or products] are predicated on this idea that we actually don't know, and we don't understand them or that our bodies are secret or unknowable to us. We get caught up in this idea that someone else knows [about them better] and we wait for them to reveal it to us.
What does your wellness routine look like right now?
I sleep a lot. I'm a real classical Pilates person. I walk everywhere because I live in a city. I do Soul Cycle, I go to a dance studio called Forward Space. I don’t take any supplements, I don’t do food elimination or replacement. I eat everything. I don't not drink, but I don't drink a lot. That's sort of it. It's pretty basic. Oh, I love a massage too. They're the best; I’ve never turned one down.
Lead Image: Collage courtesy of Sarah Olivieri
This article originally appeared on Harper'sBazaar.com
