Wellness Clichés to Retire

Overused media and marketing terms: 2025 edition. Plus: oral care, 'introspection burnout,' mental health misinfo, and more trends

Updates: I chatted with Glossy about public figures like Ivanka dipping their toes into health content. I personally don’t think Ivanka is angling to become a wellfluencer; she’s simply doing what every celeb and average woman is doing—showing off their health and fitness regimen. No different from the Outdoor Voices “doing things” campaign.

“People used to post their fashion outfits. Now they post their wellness routine,” said Rina Raphael, author of the book “The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care” and the Well To Do Substack. “If you open up any women’s fashion magazine, they no longer ask people, ‘Who are you wearing?’ and things of that sort. Instead, they ask, ‘What’s your wellness routine?’”

Read: Trading Politics for Wellness

McGill’s Office for Science & Society’s Jonathan Jarry criticized media coverage of backward walking and included my theory on wellness as fashion:

Their authors are almost never scientists; they interview a few “experts” who believe in the very preliminary evidence trickling in through the academic literature; and the entire thing is treated as fashion, as the author of The Gospel of Wellness, Rina Raphael, once told me. Bone broths are out. It’s now time to embrace walking backward, until the next Big Thing in fitness rolls in.

Read: The Benefits of Backward Walking Are Not on Solid Ground

Wellness Clichés to Ditch in 2025

iStock/AnSyvanych

A chunk of my work centers around wellness marketing: how it’s wielded (and weaponized) to sell everything from supplements to CBD-infused toilet paper.

But a lot’s changed in the last few years. We've rooted out a lot of useless terminology thanks to experts increasingly debunking health myths and media outlets finally showing the slightest bit of skepticism.

We killed “detox” (although “reset” took its place). We put “clean” on life support. We injured “plant-based.” We put a dent in “self-care.” (Unfortunately, “integrative” is still alive and kicking.)

Here are several more buzzwords worth ditching—not just because they’re incorrect or vague but because they’re overplayed.