With the global wellness market set to reach $8.5 trillion by 2027, having a grasp of the vast complexities of the market is vital to tapping into its revenue potential. The Global Wellness Summit’s annual The Future of Wellness Report outlines 10 key development for the coming twelve months of the industry.
As a leading research figure in the market, the Global Wellness Summit is a meeting of experts across eleven sectors of the wellness industry. Aside from its reports and virtual events, the organization also hosts the annual summit, with this year’s rendition taking place in Abu Dhabi in November 2025.
Last year’s report dove into the potential of climate-adaptive practices, new masculine concepts around emotional and mental health, as well as AI-driven art for immersive experiences. From the anticipated $200 billion weight loss drugs market to the $20.24 billion sports hospitality market, there are plenty of burgeoning categories for the years ahead.
The Future of Wellness: 2025 Trends is a 130-page report outlining an increasingly polarized market between “hardcare” focused around high-tech innovations and “softcare” with a more accessible and low-tech approach to wellness (themes continuing on from the 2024 report). Holistic wellness is continuing to expand its roots with increasingly science-backed options while cross-category branding opportunities, like gym and supplement brand collaborations, continue to grow.
“2024 was one extremely stressful year, from rising climate disasters (like the Los Angeles wildfires) to over 50 divisive elections held globally. [The year] 2025 looks to be even more stressful and complex. People will seek wellness and healing,” states Beth McGroarty, VP of Research and Forecasting at the Global Wellness Summit.
BeautyMatter highlights the key facts and figures from the report, and their implications for the beauty industry’s upcoming years.
Analog Wellness
As an antidote to the brain and culture rotting happening through constant online culture, individuals are embracing retro, even preindustrial experiences. While AI is undoubtedly infiltrating wellness through wearables, algorithm-driven fitness plans, or massage robots, that same technology is also driving the need for human experiences.
On the mobile front, The Boring Phone, a retro flip phone designed by Heineken beer and the fashion retailer Bodega, or NYC-based The Luddite Club started in 2022, saw a group of schoolchildren swap their iPhones for low-tech flip phones, which posed a different model to the smartphone era.
This is also explains experiences like digital detox cabins or wellness resorts such as Soetmelksvlei, a 17th-century farm in South Africa where visitors learn wheat milling and blacksmithing, while Lake Austin Spa Resort in Texas offers a Creative Rx program which includes acrylic painting classes and basket weaving. Netherlands-based The Offline Club offers group activities like sketching or piano playing with attendees’ phones locked away.
The Numbers:
Takeaways: Prioritize offline experiences for consumers seeking analog modes of brand interaction.
Sauna Reimagined
Urban saunas in metropolitan cities like Chicago, waterfront saunas in Oslo, and art installation-filled spaces in Tokyo are ushering in a global sauna culture for the future driven by a need for simple, ritualistic, and in-person experiences. London’s Hackney Wick area hosted the first sauna festival, The Saunaverse in 2023, and event-sized formats can now fit hundreds of people. The SALT sauna project in Oslo regularly offers events like concerts and drag shows on health-conscious its premises. The UK, Australia, and Japan are especially noteworthy markets in this development.
There are also impressive health benefits to the practice, a great selling point for health conscious consumers. A 2018 meta review in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings saw lower rates of cardiovascular and lung disease as well as a 60% reduced risk for Alzheimer’s and dementia in regular sauna bathers, while a study from the University of Eastern Finland following over 1,500 people for 15 years, reported a 62% reduced stroke risk in those who used saunas four to seven times a week.
The Numbers:
Takeaways: With the growing sauna movement, SKUs designed for these experiences or branded events in these spaces can capture a new audience.
The Supplement Paradox
Supplements are a $178 billion market (with a 9.1% CAGR through 2030), but said market has also encountered ongoing public skepticism around validity and safety given the fact that the FDA does not approve dietary supplements before they hit the market.
There will be a greater emphasis on clinical testing to show ingredient performance, as evidenced by NAD+ focused brands like ChromaDex or Nestlé- and L’Oréal-backed longevity business Timeline, which focuses on mitochondrial health and cellular repair.
Biomarker and genetic testing, plus predictive AI on platforms like Ongevity and InsideTracker, will ensure consumers take the supplements most suitable to their specific needs. With the number of semaglutide prescriptions increasing by 442% between January 2021 and December 2023, supplements marketed towards counteracting side effects like muscle loss and digestive issues like Elo Health’s GLP-1 protein powder are hitting the market.
Brand launches like Ovii and Ova, as well as Morramam Labs’ Luma app target the ongoing growth category of hormonal health and fertility. Premium supplements like Clinique La Prairie's $651 formulations and LYMA's $269 monthly subscription are targeting a luxury wellness consumer who also desires a more upscale packaging and product experience. Other companies are prioritizing a whole-food approach such as GEM, which offers chewable supplements containing ingredients like turmeric, mushrooms, and sunflower oil.
In the future, GWI predicts that nanotechnology will optimize supplement precision and efficiency through the use of ultrasound-activated nanocarriers and silk fibroin nanocarriers. Metabolic psychiatry, or the impact of metabolic health on mental well-being, will continue what the surge in gut microbiome research and launches started.
The Numbers:
Takeaways: The supplement market will become increasingly competitive as consumers seek out brands with clinical testing to back their claims. Brands are wise to focus their offerings on specific markets, be they menopausal women or whole food enthusiasts. Clinics and spas offering medical-grade infusions and treatments can also capitalize on consumers seeking the latest innovative health boost.
Teen Wellness
Given the unignorable mental health crisis among adolescents worldwide, companies are stepping in to offer them more solutions. Teen-centric spas and resorts like Zulal Wellness Resort by Chiva-Som in Qatar have designed retreats to cultivate emotional intelligence and mindful habits for the transition into adulthood. The CALM (Creating Acceptance, Living Mindfully) Teen Program at Sacred Treehouse in Florida is an eight-week mindfulness program for stress reduction.
Alternative modalities like sound healing or apps like Sorted Teens (which uses audio tracks aimed at 10 to 15-year-olds to help build confidence, increase muscle relaxation, and promote better sleep) and Clear Fear (which uses CBT-based methods to help reduce anxiety) are offering tools of relief.
GWI also explored the teen market as it relates to beauty, reporting on the rise of Sephora kids and 70% of Gen Z males using skincare products, but cautioned against the industry targeting these consumers with potent skincare products.
The Numbers:
Takeaways: Beauty brands should remain mindful of the impact of their products and marketing on the teenage demographics. Wellness-focused enterprises can look at branded experiences in teen spa spaces or offer SKUs specifically aimed at improving teenage mental health.
Watershed Wellness
Water is the basis of producing many products and services in the salon, spa, and professional space. But with a single drench shower using ten and a half gallons of water per guest, which could amount to over ten million gallons used annually at one spa alone, there are certainly areas of improvement that become all the more vital as the world faces an increasing water crisis.
In the spirit of preserving and renewing water resources, Rancho La Puerta Spa in Mexico invested $5 million into a water-healing plant in 2022, which treats over seven gallons of sewage per second to provide water to irrigate its gardens and vineyards.
Greywater recycling (treating wastewater from non-toilet plumbing systems to reuse it for other purposes)—used by Thailand’s Chiva-Som resort in Hua Hin and the Four Seasons Resort Seychelles—plus closed-loop systems like those employed by Six Senses Zighy Bay in Oman, using a closed loop water system for their pools and spas, can be other useful tools to reduce water wastage. Wild swimming pools or thermal baths utilize what nature has provided instead of using more resources.
With most beauty products containing 70% to 80% water, waterless formulations can also contribute to more mindful water consumption. The now-shuttered LOLI Beauty, which offered upcycled, zero-waste skincare, was an early advocate of these models. Blueland’s tablet and powder cleaning and personal care products attracted a $20 million growth investment round in 2022.
The Numbers:
Takeaways: By reducing water wastage through infrastructural changes, wellness destinations can make a substantial impact on their use of the precious resource. Brands can also reduce their consumption rates by creating waterless formulas.
Augmented Biology
A fusion of humans and machines will enable a new potential in neural, physiological, and psychological health. The Future Laboratory nodded to this growing connection between AI, healthcare/wellness, and humanity in its 2024 Trend Briefing dubbed The Synthocene Era. One product example is Neurable’s headphones with brain-computer interface technology that analyzes and processes brain signals to alert users when they need to take a work break, in a bid to avoid burnout.
Beyond tech-driven approaches, pyschodermatology, as evidenced by brands like Selfmade or Topicals research into the mental health impact of skin conditions, continues the holistic, mind-body approach that has been percolating in wellness circles over several years.
Neurocell wellness boosts neurological health through cellular solutions. One product example is MitoQ’s Adrenal + Balance supplement, which helps manage everyday stress by regulating cortisol levels with ingredients like ashwagandha, rhodiola, maritime pine, and mitoquinol mesylate (a synthetic antioxidant that protects mitochondria or the cell’s energy source). On the skincare front, innovations like Pavise’s DiamondCore, a molecule that reverses skin’s biological age and prevents future oxidative and UV damage, or Orpheus’ Orpheus Flower Cell Peptide Complex, which leverages the defense systems of the Orpheus flower to repair stress-induced DNA damage and improve collagen production, are presenting new frontiers of innovation.
The Numbers:
Takeaways: Continuing research into cell-driven skincare innovation and mind-body connections will be at the forefront of the buzziest brand launches, marketed more towards longevity than aesthetics alone.
Longevity Redefines Work
Workplaces are shifting as there are less younger workers and more over-65 employees, partially enabled by a shift towards more knowledge and service-based positions over physical labor. Governments in the US, Japan, and Germany increasing the retirement age is also contributing to this older workforce.
The practice of reverse mentoring—when a junior employee mentors a senior employee—is finding applications at institutions like Estée Lauder Companies, which has grown its reverse mentoring program to over 600 senior leaders. It’s not just skillsets, but the health of the workforce that companies should be cognizant of. Proactive strategies to foster healthier aging from the side of governments and insurance companies (an especially controversial topic in the US following the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson) as well as wellness programs at places of employment, will be a key touchpoint for ensuring their well-being.
Countries are also working towards a more age-forward society, as evidenced by Singapore’s raising of the re-employment age and implementation of the SkillsFuture skill development opportunities program for older workers or the US’s Age Discrimination in Employment Act, which protects those ages 40 and above. The workplaces themselves will adapt to a generation of workers that are prioritizing flexibility and better work-life balances, while companies should prioritize inclusivity and adaptability in their technology and communication strategies to help bridge the cross-generational divide.
The Numbers:
Takeaways: Beauty companies will embrace a more mature workforce, while brands, especially those in wellness, will find an increasingly growing audience among boomer consumers. Aside from ensuring cross-generational diversity, employers should also ensure their work environments offer additional health benefits for employees.
Wellness Tackles Addiction
Whether it’s smartphone or substance addiction, treatment options are getting a luxury upgrade, with sober-curious and technology-free retreats hosted at five-star-worthy treatment centers like Carrara Treatment, Wellness & Spa in California and Paracelsus Recovery in Zurich, which offer spa treatment, yoga, and nutritional therapy alongside their treatment programs. Meanwhile, for sober-curious folks, the Sober Powered Nervous System Reboot Retreat is a three-day experience hosted at Montevalle Health & Wellness Resort & Spa. When it comes to technology addiction, Clinic Les Alpes in Switzerland offers a $50,000 technology addiction treatment, which includes art and Pilates.
On the product front, Blip offers nicotine-free toothpicks to help individuals quit cigarettes or vaping. Kin Euphorics offers alcohol-free beverages with adaptogens and botanics while Puff Herbals (launched in 2021) creates cigarette alternatives with ingredients like lemon balm and wormwood. Just as THC-free CBD was the non-psychoactive alternative to marijuana, these SKUs offer relaxing or uplifting effects without intoxication.
Digital coaching service Zabit and Tommy Rosen’s Recovery 2.0 platform help health-conscious individuals stay on top of their recovery and wellness goals. Ketamine therapy, like the psychedelics movement, is being utilized to help treat addiction and other mental health issues.
The Numbers:
Takeaways: While beauty brands are in no way a substitute for therapy and in-patient treatment centers, wellness brands can think about the benefits of their products, such as stress reduction or mood improvement, for those struggling with substance abuse issues.
Wellness on the Line
As some consumers embrace slower travel and more luxury-focused experiences, cruises and train travel are being given luxury updates like Dior Spa carriages on Belmond trains or COMO Hotels offering an Arctic cruise with COMO Shambhala wellness treatments like deep tissue massages. The spa treatments aboard cruise ships like Crystal Cruises include IV therapies, Restylane, and Elemis facials, show no lack of prestige compared to on-land offerings. Blue World Voyages offers a sports and wellness-themed cruise, with yoga and fitness amenities as well as air and water purification systems, vitamin C-infused showers, and circadian lighting onboard, a departure from debaucherous days of heavy drinking and gambling some might find on other ships.
The journeys are also getting more international. Railbookers Group is planning to launch the Around the World by Luxury Train voyage in September 2025, a 59-day journey across 12 countries, seven trains, and four continents. Railway travels are also being prioritized by eco-conscious travelers who want to reduce their carbon footprint by flying less.
The scenic options are also expanding, be they a sleeper train ride aboard the ¥555,000 ($3,592) Train Suite Shiki-shima designed by Ken Okuyama (known for his work with Ferarri and Maserati) to Japan’s far north or Norwegian Cruise Line’s educational tour of Mayan culture and medicine trail along a canopied jungle path. River cruises by VIVA Cruises and AmaWaterWays are breathing new life into the genre with infrared saunas and onboard wellness centers.
Partnerships with celebrities and experts like Deepack Chopra (who partnered with expedition cruise line Swan Hellenic on a multiyear partnership for the Explore & Restore well-being cruises) and Gwyneth Paltrow, who organized a nine-day “goop at Sea” cruise through the Italian Riviera and France with Celebrity Cruises, are also exciting new audiences for expeditions via land and sea.
The Numbers:
Takeaways: Treatments and amenities aboard luxury trains and cruise ships can open up a world of new consumer touchpoints.
The Middle East’s Wellness Ambitions
Driven by a wealthy demographic and luxury-seeking consumer audience, the Middle East will emerge as a wellness leader. Oman’s Vision 2040 initiative emphasizes preventative health, aiming to get its Health, Legatum Prosperity Index from 79.03 to over 81.257 by 2030. Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 targets wellness tourism, which is predicted to increase Riyadh’s targeted visits to 27.4 million in 2030. Spaces like Qatar’s Zulal Wellness Resort, which blends contemporary spa treatments with traditional Arabic and Islamic medicine will be sites of ancient practices mixing with modern facilities. Equally, The Longevity Hub with locations including Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, offers quantum body scanning and red light therapy alongside breathwork sessions. SHA Emirates, described as “the world's first healthy living island” with more than 100 residencies, is expected to open in 2026.
Beauty brands celebrating Middle Eastern heritage like Asteri Beauty and MZN Bodycare, which utilizes the plants of Saudi Arabia like prickly pear oil, date seed oil, and pomegranate extract, are also lending a new face to the region both locally and globally.
AI-driven health services are also showing promising adoption with the Middle East's largest AI-based digital health platform, raising $44 million in investments in 2022.
The Numbers:
Takeaways: Expect more brand launches and spa openings as the Middle East continues to establish itself as a wellness and beauty force to be reckoned with globally. Especially spa-based Western beauty brands have an opportunity for further market growth in this arena.
