The 5 Biggest Wellness Themes to Watch in 2025

In the zodiac calendar, 2025 is the year of the snake, portending transformation and renewal. The wellness industry, however, isn’t as much entering a new period this year as it is doubling down on changes already in progress.

The buzziest wellness trends of 2025 continue to track with long-term shifts in how consumers think about their health — the way we age, the shape of our bodies — facilitated by new developments in technology, medicine and culture. The centuries-old pursuit of lasting health and modern anti-aging has been refocused in the post-pandemic age as “well-aging” and longevity, bolstering interest in supplements and alternative therapies.

The widespread adoption of GLP-1 agonist medications will surely continue, with stigmas around using drugs like Wegovy or Mounjaro shedding fast, fueling demand for nutritional products suited to consumers’ suddenly specific dietary needs. But 2025’s biggest shift began to firm up on Monday as President Donald Trump was inaugurated. If Robert F. Kennedy Jr, his pick for secretary of health and human services, is confirmed — and his rallying cry to Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, goes mainstream — there could be considerable change coming to health and wellness in the US from a regulatory standpoint.

The surest thing is that wellness will continue to pervade the closely-related beauty, food and fitness industries.

“It’s an exciting time, when you’ve got wellness connecting through skincare, through technology, through ingredients,” said Justin Boxford, the global brand president of the Estée Lauder label.

Long Live Longevity

Longevity is perhaps the most dominant theme in wellness right now, inspiring a “whole change of conversation,” said Boxford. He’s talking about words like healthspan replacing lifespan — implying great health can happen at any age — and biological aging superseding chronological aging.

“Chronological aging seems to be a bit passé,” said Michael Nolte, an SVP and creative director at insights platform Beautystreams. “You can’t measure your age solely by the number on your passport.”

One’s “biological age” is determined through a battery of pricey tests and doesn’t necessary relate to the number on your birth certificate — a chronological Millennial who smokes, for example, could be a biological Boomer.

New ingredients are being created to address recently-understood developments in cell health, like the process of “senescence” by which cells die off. This is where the field of longevity starts to look familiar: Dsm-firmenich’s Eterwell Youth, a trademarked ingredient made from an Alpine herb, promises to make you “look nine years younger in just three months.”

The Estée Lauder brand announced it will support the Stanford Center of Longevity to further its research into how to keep skin cells fresher for longer. One way is by targeting sirtuins, molecules found in the body that Boxford calls “the ultimate longevity proteins”; the brand’s new Re-Nutriv eye cream boasts a patented Sirtivity-LP complex, “proven to not only slow but reverse visible aging,” according to a press release.

Longevity will also continue to permeate spas, trickling down from Alpine resorts like Clinique La Prairie (which has been hosting longevity-centric retreats for the past century, but recently opened lavish outposts in Bangkok and Dubai) and into upscale gym chains like Equinox (and their new $40,000 membership, which includes epigenetic testing). Despite rumblings about these types of clinics one day spreading to strip malls, all evidence indicates that longevity remains a luxury product — if no longer a priceless one.

Ozempic’s Supersized Economy

At the end of 2024, pharma giant Novo Nordisk, the largest company in Europe by market capitalisation and the makers of GLP-1 medications Ozempic and Wegovy, announced it had entered late stage trials for a new product called CagriSema, a so-called “Super Ozempic” that combines the two medications cagrilintide and semaglutide and promises to shed 25 percent of a patient’s body weight.

The results of one of those trials, which posted in late December, showed disappointing results, with 3400 patients seeing an average weight loss of 22 percent — about the same as Zepbound, Eli Lilly’s tirzepatide injection — and just over half making it to the full dosage, suggesting gnarlier side effects. The news prompted Novo’s stock to plummet.

Still, it’s clear the race to produce even better weight loss drugs is well underway. Pfizer’s oral GLP-1 drug, danuglipron, could enter late-stage clinical trials in late 2025, with Novo and Lilly working on their own ingestible (versus injectable) versions; US financial firm Morningstar predicts as many as 16 new drugs could launch by 2029.

Their widespread adoption is “transforming eating habits, driving a shift toward nutrient-dense, smaller portions,” said Danika Gloege, insights director at social listening firm Black Swan Data, which digests millions of online posts across platforms.

This has led to an increase in protein-packed products at the grocery store, like Chobani’s new “High Protein” yogurts or Nestlé’s Boost Pre-Meal Hunger Support shakes, sold in a pack of four on Amazon. (Black Swan also notes demand for multivitamins, protein bars and bone broth.) Plant proteins derived from fungi and algae species are also ascendant, Gloege added, citing the popularity of spirulina-dusted popcorn at trendy grocery chain Erewhon.

A Right Path to Health

The wellness community’s embrace of largely unregulated alternative medicines and therapies has increasingly become associated with the far right. That is set to continue in 2025, with President Donald Trump’s appointment of Kennedy as HHS secretary.

Kennedy has attracted rabid fans and passionate critics for his scepticism around vaccines and processed foods, and has also declared his own war on the “aggressive suppression” of “psychedelics, peptides, stem cells,” and “raw milk,” paving the way for alternative therapies to go mainstream. (In step with this move to the right, “carnivore diet” was a breakout wellness term in 2024, according to Spate.) Trump, similarly, said he would “course-correct and refocus” the FDA, nominating the surgeon Marty Makary to lead the agency.

It’s a shift from years past. “Historically, Republican administrations have taken a more restrained approach to regulation and enforcement,” explained Marcha Isabelle Chaudry, an attorney and policy analyst. The Biden Administration, for instance, passed the Modernization of Cosmetic Regulation Act, or MoCRA, a bipartisan effort that provided the first updates to the FDA’s regulation of cosmetics in 80 years, which went into effect in July 2024. Under MoCRA, cosmetic companies are obligated to register their manufacturing facilities, and to report adverse events from using their products to the FDA.

“I see those staying in place,” Chaudry said. “They’re not too stringent.”

But they don’t seem safe, either, after Trump spent his first day in office rolling back a wide range of Biden’s policies from immigration to DEI. Chaudry emphasized the continued importance of brands, retailers and agencies to do their own legwork when it comes to validating their claims and ingredients.

“It’s not just about marketing — customers want functional benefits,” Chaudry said. “It goes back to performance and substantiation. We’re going to want more proof that the product works.”

Vogue Vitamins

NAD+, or nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, a naturally-occurring molecule that facilitates human metabolism, has become a popular offering at upscale spas and “longevity” clinics and is typically administered via intravenous drip. (NAD+ and sirtuins are closely related.)

Regular doses can improve cognition and energy, according to influential supporters. Athletes like NAD+ for its supposed performance benefits, and Rhode founder Hailey Bieber recently said she was planning to receive NAD+ “for the rest of my life.”

There is scant evidence that drugs like NAD+ make much of a difference in human life span, but consumer interest has spread nonetheless. Spate’s new Popularity Index, which tracks trends across Google and TikTok, recorded a surge in search volume for NAD+ supplements (up 226 percent from last year) and their benefits (up 414 percent). On TikTok in particular, mentions of NAD+ often appear alongside the #antiaging hashtag, which Spate’s Addison Cain believes is correlated to an increased focus on longevity.

Fragrance Made Functional

Perfumes of all kinds — from sweet, inexpensive body mists to niche, artisanal scent expressions — had a banner year in 2024 as beauty’s fastest-growing category. Next year, converging wellness themes will buoy it to new heights.

“Functional healing” was Black Swan Data’s top future growth trend in the fragrance category, Gloege said. These fragrances, which provide benefits to the user that go beyond scent alone, may have finally gone mainstream. Labels like Being Frenshe, the Target-sold brand co-founded by the actress Ashley Tisdale, released candles and fragrances that contain a proprietary “Moodscience” complex that claims to improve its wearers’ mood. The brand’s Vanilla Cashmere Body Mist is the number one fragrance SKU in mass retail, according to Maesa, who manufactures the line.

Feel-good fragrance can be functional, but Gloege also points to formulas that boast benefits, especially when it comes to sleep. (Fragrance searches including keywords “performance” and “sleep” were up 32 percent and 88 percent, respectively.) This provides opportunities for mass and niche fragrance brands, but also wellness labels.

Supplement brand the Nue Co., which first launched its “Functional Fragrance” that claims to “support stress relief” with notes of palo santo, in 2018, more recently relaunched its fragrances in a collection that now includes formulations called Water Therapy (also anti-stress) and Mind Energy (for focus); a new addition will launch early this year.

Through as small a gesture as spritzing perfume, consumers hope to “transform daily routines into opportunities for holistic healing,” Gloege said.

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