GWS explores the connection between beauty and wellness

The latest in a series of Global Wellness Summit (GWS) business sessions dedicated to specific wellness sector topics has explored how beauty can meaningfully contribute to wellness.

The Wellness Sector Spotlight featured special guest Anjan Chatterjee, MD, chair of neurology at Pennsylvania Hospital and author of the Global Wellness Institute’s Beauty2Wellness study as well as The Aesthetic Brain.

The session examined the beauty-wellness connection as well as how it will potentially impact the $1bn personal care, beauty and anti-ageing economy.

With an increased focus on diversity shedding light on age-old perceptions of self-image and beauty, the session explored how new understanding of the link between beauty and wellbeing are shaping and changing wellness trends.

“There is some new data which appears to show that good people are also viewed as being more attractive. Consequently, if you want to appear more attractive to other people, you need to be seen to be doing good things,” said Dr Chatterjee. 

Among the other interesting subjects outlined was how language plays into perceptions of beauty and ability.

“We looked at ten years of Google News headlines and asked the question, what are words that behave very similarly to beauty? We also looked at words that related to wellness and then those terms that co-occur. We then took the top 15 words associated with beauty and wellness to derive a set of correlations.

“Notable findings included that women appear to associate education with beauty and men don’t. Education is perhaps a proxy for intelligence. For wellness, one thing that particularly stands out is that men associate talent with wellness and women don’t.

“We found that, with semantic networks, women have more structured concepts of beauty and wellness than men. Also, older people have more structured concepts of beauty and wellness than younger people.”