For years, the beauty industry has treated beauty and wellness as two distinct categories. Beauty was about appearance. Wellness was about health, wellbeing and how we feel. But I have always found that distinction rather artificial.
The skin is part of the body. What happens to one inevitably affects the other. How we eat, sleep, manage stress and care for ourselves is reflected in our skin — and the condition of our skin can influence how we feel about ourselves.
So perhaps what we are witnessing now is the convergence of beauty and wellness and the industry catching up with the industry mega trends driven by consumer demands.
A recent piece by Trent TrendSpotter, Today’s Beauty Investment Remit Is Much Bigger Than Beauty makes this point particularly well, arguing that today's beauty investment remit is becoming considerably broader because consumers themselves no longer draw such a clear line between looking good and feeling good.
That observation struck me because it describes something we have believed at Formulae Prescott since we launched in 2017.
We never saw skincare as an isolated beauty category.
We saw it as part of a wider approach to wellbeing and all our formulations are crafted with that approach in mind
The problem with categories
The beauty industry is exceptionally good at creating categories… Skincare. Haircare. Supplements. Nutrition. Wellness. Aesthetic treatments.
These categories are useful commercially, but they don't necessarily reflect how people actually experience their lives. Consumers don’t think about which industry category their needs belong to.
They simply want their skin to be healthy. They want to feel comfortable in themselves. They want products that work. They want to understand what they are putting on their bodies. And increasingly, they want those choices to make sense alongside the way they approach the rest of their wellbeing. These are the mega trends driving the skin care industry.
That is a fundamentally different mindset from the traditional beauty model of adding more products, more steps and more complexity.
Skincare as part of wellbeing
When we developed Formulae Prescott, our starting point was deliberately different. Our philosophy was — and remains — that skincare is topical nutrition: food for the skin. That thinking informed everything from our ingredient choices to our approach to multifunctionality.
Multifunctionality, for us, was never simply about convenience. It was about questioning whether a modern skincare routine really needs ten different products when carefully considered formulations can perform multiple roles.
It was about doing more with less, not overburdening the skin but giving it exactly what it needs to stay healthy and radiant.
And it was about recognising that the modern luxury consumer is increasingly interested in what a product does, why it contains the ingredients it does, and how it fits into a wider lifestyle.
That feels particularly relevant now.
Wellness is becoming more sophisticated
The wellness conversation itself has also changed. It is no longer simply about yoga, meditation and green juice.
Wellness has become much more closely connected to longevity, nutrition, sleep, stress management, preventative health and increasingly — beauty. At the same time, beauty consumers are becoming more educated and more discerning. They are questioning ingredients. They are looking for efficacy. They are interested in skin health rather than simply short-term cosmetic effects.
The boundaries were always more porous than the industry suggested. They are simply becoming harder to ignore.
The Beauty Insider recently explored this same shift in a piece on “wellness-driven luxury”, using Formulae Prescott as an example of how skincare can become more intelligent, multifunctional and aligned with a wider approach to wellbeing.
For me, the significance isn't that the word “wellness” is now being applied to skincare. It is that luxury itself is being redefined.
The future of luxury may be less about more
For decades, luxury beauty has often been associated with abundance: more products, elaborate rituals, rare ingredients, increasingly complex routines.
I think the next iteration of luxury may be rather different. It may be about discernment.
- Knowing what your skin actually needs.
- Choosing fewer, better-formulated products.
- Understanding ingredients rather than being impressed by their rarity.
- Expecting efficacy rather than accepting marketing claims.
- And increasingly, choosing products that sit comfortably within a broader philosophy of health and wellbeing.
In that sense, simplicity can become a luxury. And intelligence can become a luxury.
The consumer is already there
What interests me most is that this isn't really a prediction about where consumers might go. Consumers are already behaving this way. The categories are simply taking longer to catch up. They are looking at skincare alongside nutrition, sleep, movement and other aspects of wellbeing because they understand intuitively that these things are connected.
The opportunity for the beauty industry is not to put another label on that behaviour. It is to rethink what we mean by beauty in the first place. At Formulae Prescott, this way of thinking has been part of our DNA since 2017.
We didn't set out to make wellness into a beauty trend. We simply never believed that beauty and wellbeing were separate conversations.
Perhaps the real shift is that the industry is finally beginning to see them that way too.
