Wellness 3.0
Karen B.K. Chan
Sex and Emotional Literacy Educator
“Through the pandemic, we saw that wellness is not just a nice-to-have; it has life and death consequences. For many, it was a wake-up call. It also increased our prioritization of gratification, connection, time and rest, as there’s an increased dissatisfaction with the daily grind and a work-life imbalance. Social distancing emphasized both the day-to-day isolation that’s embedded in our ways of life and the urgent need for social connection—recent research on loneliness has shown that it’s comparable to other risks for cardiovascular disease. My personal opinion is that how we understand intimacy has changed; it is appreciated more and more as a felt experience and not just something one can check off a list or accumulate. Moving forward, I see interest in comprehensive wellness increasing along with choosiness regarding where we work, how we work and how we spend our time. This ultimately changes where we live, who we live with and what we spend our time doing.”
Kim Carmichael
Assistant Spa Director, Willow Stream Spa, Fairmont Pacific Rim
“There have been incredible advancements in technology and it’s become increasingly important to offer touchless treatments and virtual and self-guid- ed experiences. Take sound therapy, where you use sound to harmonize your nervous system by activating different parts of your brain. Treatments that merge sound vibration and music tap into your own chakras to reduce stress and improve concentration. Guests can just put on earphones and take a self-guided journey. Depending on what playlist you select, there’s different benefits like improved concentration or physical performance. Customizing experiences is still some- thing that we’re trying to do by making sure that we’re focusing on the individual versus à la carte. There’s more focus on self-care that factors in nutrition, sleep, diet and activities that restore and re-energize the body, mind and spirit. Perhaps it’s more of an in- vestment in the self versus filling your closet with more things.”
Rupert Schmid
Co-President/Co-Chairman, Biologique Recherche
“Whatever the political and economic challenges we will face, wellness will continue to grow all over the world. The average annual growth rate of the wellness industry is over 10 percent, and this will continue in the coming years. This does not include the many aspects of ‘wellbeing’ like walking
in nature, hiking or eating more natural products, for example, which are hardly monetizable. These are now promoted at a local level, which leads me to think that they will be more than successful, and not only
in wealthy countries. Each customer will be looking for wellness in their daily lives and every industry will have to evolve. Consumers will continue to become more and more concerned and educated. They will value true wellness benefits and corporate social responsibility and will no longer accept shortcuts. They will value real relationships, they will value real personalization and they will value transparency much more than in the past. At BR, we have always believed that each person, each life, each DNA, each RNA, each emotion is unique.”
Colette Yeomans
Owner, Clarité Wellness
“With all of the advances we will see in technology and our world over this next de- cade, we will benefit greatly from bringing old-world wisdom and practices in
to keep us balanced, and I think people will be seeking this out more. The interesting thing about advances in science is that it often does a full circle back to what was always known and practiced in the past. I think the emphasis will likely shift from synthetic isolates to bioavailable plant extracts, from synthetic scents to properly distilled essential oils and natural infusions, from overuse of ablative intensive resurfacing to more restorative treatments and from a one-size- fits-all approach to truly bespoke treatments. As a society we have mastered and overvalued the logical, pragmatic ‘masculine’ way, but we have to make more space for the integration of the ‘feminine’ aspects to emerge now. In the wellness industry I believe this means listening in a new way. To feel beautiful, [and to] smell, taste and see beauty is one of life's greatest pleasures. I think we have to broaden our scope of what this means so we create more beauty in our world. The one-size- fits-all beauty is robbing us of so much.”
Dr. Shari Caplan
Medical Director and Founder, VitalityMD Toronto
“People are seeking out information on how to stay healthy. Where traditional care is focused on waiting until you’re sick and then doing something, the more holistic approach is asking what you can do now to keep yourself healthy. More people are aware that there’s a different type of medicine called functional integrative medicine and they’re looking for those practitioners. They realize that it’s not just about a prescription—it’s about eating better, exercising and managing stress and psychological health. People are biochemistry sets and if you don’t have all the right ingredients, we’re not going to work well or feel well. People are also looking for connection. In today’s world, a lot of people are stressed and libido goes out the window. If they can reconnect with their partner and have better sex, then why not? It’s been very exciting that people are willing to talk about it.”
Charlotte Diassé
Export Sales Manager, Biologique Recherche
“Beauty and skin health has become very, very import- ant in people’s minds. It always has been but looking good—not only your skin and beauty but also your style, your clothes, your haircut—has become very important because of the exposure on social media. More and more people are working remotely and look at their reflection and appearance during video calls. An increasing number of people have been doing aesthetic medicine with doctors, injections to fix what they dislike, however the texture of your skin and its health cannot be changed with injections. You still need cosmetics, you need hydration and you need high-quality products to have a nice skin texture. Today, receiving a treatment is, yes, of course, taking care of my skin, but also offering myself a parenthesis of relaxation. We’ve been doing a study that looks at neuroscience and proved that, if you received a treatment—you lay down on the bed, that you let yourself be taken care of by someone—it is going to have an impact on your wellbeing induced by this facial care. This approach aims to decipher the psychophysiological mechanisms triggered during a Biologique Recherche facial treatment and provide new understandings that link treatments to the construction of emotional wellbeing in its psychological and physiological dimensions.”