I was surprised when I first googled “wellness washing” and realised it wasn’t a common term. Pages and pages of results appeared, but they were all about “wellbeing washing” – mostly in relation to corporate mental health programmes and hollow promises about employee wellbeing. I found nothing about the phenomenon that I – as a wellness editor – spot every day, one that seems to be intensifying by the minute.
Thanks to what I’m now calling wellness washing – because it seems to be the best way to describe it – many of us are prioritising hauls of cheaply-made plastic items instead of actually improving our health outcomes. We don’t really need to be sleepmaxxing or doing the “morning shed” to be healthy.
