Our 2024 trend report drops soon. ‘Til then, we love looking back to see how we did on the year we just lived through…
Is it safe to say that trends aren’t trending? In the liminal space that was 2022, self-care necessitated a healthy dose of boundary-building and a slower pace of life for many. Meanwhile, Tiktok accelerated the pace of trends of all kinds, ironically contributing to some pretty major trend fatigue as we kick off the year of 2023. With the breakneck speed of trends mashing up against the slower pace of life, many of us were left holding our relationship to trend adherence at arm’s length.
We have a complex relationship with trends overall here at The Chalkboard. As a niche, L.A.-based site, we’re ahead of most wellness trends by years. And we sometimes find ourselves exhausted watching things like dry brushing or chia pudding get shoved through the morning show and social media circuits years after we know our readers have made them part of their daily routines.
That said, trends often help us to discover and learn, and — ultimately, if we don’t take ourselves too seriously — they can be really fun. If it takes a celebrity tweet or viral video to normalize lymphatic massage, clean makeup or daily meditation, we’ll take it.
Trends also clue us in to emerging technologies, which is where we start this year’s 2023 report below.
If you want to learn more on what to eat, the growth of Dry January, and the top supplements, herbs and adaptogens, you know that we’ll be covering all of that in our continued daily coverage!
personal health monitoring tech | For years now, biohackers and nutritionists have shown us how to harness the direct feedback from a wearable device like a Continuous Glucose Monitor or HRV device to take our health into our own hands. We expect this space to grow as consumer interest widens and as the tech itself advances.
At this year’s CES tech event, several personal health monitoring devices were debuted, including The Withings U-Scan, a pebble-like monitor that fits inside your toilet bowl and measures many of the biomarkers you’d get in a traditional urine test, from hormone levels to ketones — including actionable daily health advice.
3 Incredibly Good Reads On The Future Of Wellness + Longevity
The Future of Longevity | All eyes are on Harvard genetics professor and author of Lifespan, David Sinclair PhD. Lifespan: Why We Age―and Why We Don’t Have To was published in 2019, but we’ll be unpacking the nuances of this book for years. Echoing many of Dan Buettner’s learnings in The Blue Zones, some of Sinclair’s insights are practical — intermittent fasting, cold exposure, and exercising with the right intensity. Others depend on technologies in medicine that are still emerging such as NMN supplementation and gene therapy.
The father of biohacking, Dave Asprey is also a lead voice in this space. Asprey plans on living well beyond the age of 100 and continues to share all of his personal testing and research with a rapt wellness audience.
2022’s Life Force was also a sign that this topic is trending with consumers in a big way. The book brought together self-help guru, Tony Robbins, Dr. Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation, and biotech’s Dr. Robert Hariri to unpack the latest in ‘precision medicine’ and its promise to optimize ‘healthspan’.
That brings us to our next trend which is precision medicine and personalized healthcare itself…
precision medicine + personalized healthcare | Life Force Diagnostics puts it well: “Stop guessing, start addressing.” Are your supplements, herbs, workouts and sleep schedule really working for you? Precision medicine will tell you.
There has been an absolute boom in personalized healthcare clinics over the last few years from Forward to Parsley to Sollis Health. Most often, these clinics offer frequent diagnostics, such as blood and hormone testing, along with the clinical reporting and medical consultations necessary for consumers to make faster, better decisions about their health.
These highly attentive, personalized services are the future of preventative health and true wellness. Many of them take a holistic or functional medicine approach, which we love to see, but are still financially inaccessible for many. Like so many important trends, this one holds promise to trickle down into broader models that more consumers can hope to take advantage of in the future.
at-home wellness testing | We’re also seeing a boom in at-home test kit services lately which adds depth and accessibility to the personalized healthcare trend overall.
Brands like Everlywell offer every kind of health test you can imagine from food sensitivity to heavy metal testing. Others offer more specialized testing, such as the fertility testing provided by reproductive health brand, Natalist.
Some going as far as to match you with supplements or skincare that fit your personalized outcomes. Viome offers a Full Body Intelligence® test before providing consumers with precision supplements. Skincare brand Veracity assesses factors in skin health with a saliva test, followed by custom product recommendations.
Peptide therapies | Don’t let the controversy over celebrity-driven weight loss trends fool you, peptide therapies are here to stay. While semaglutide made big waves last year as an off-label weight loss drug Hollywood adhered to in droves, peptide therapies extend far beyond the promise of fat loss with benefits in areas like longevity, muscle gain, and brain health. Most peptides require daily shots over the course of several months to see results and we recommend at least one specific blood test before starting. We’ll be talking about all of that and the breadth of peptides available more later this month!
Adequate Sleep > hustle culture | Hustle culture is still down-trending and one thing is for sure — Americans have had a collective awakening around just how hard we grind.
New research and a fresh transparency around sleep hygiene was just beginning to emerge before the pandemic and a large swath of wellness pros had begun beating the drum about this often neglected health metric. (We can all thank Arianna Huffington for originally cutting through the BS on the topic.) However, it wasn’t until the stress of a global pandemic that this message really began to take root. In addition, a large swath of the workforce was able to trade their regular commute for an extra hour of sleep — and the benefits became more than just theoretical.
Just in the past three months, a whole swath of health pros are now advocating that women get up to 10 hours of sleep daily! More on this topic soon.
Women’s Health – Differentiated | Many of the women’s health and hormone pros we’re paying attention to this year have one thing in common: they are espousing the benefits of female-first research when it comes to fitness and healthcare.
We’re following women like certified hormone coach, Misty Myler who is helping to popularize the notion that while men run on a 24-hour hormone cycle that peaks every single day, women run on a 28 day (average) hormone cycle that peaks once a cycle. According to Myler, “women were left out of clinical trials until 1993, meaning that the majority of what we’ve been taught is based off the findings of the male body and then simply ‘sized down,’ and taught to women as fact.”
As we learn more about the history of male-based research, we’re beginning to better understand the differentiation required for women’s health and the protocols that best serve it.
Christy Dawn’s regenerative cotton farm
regenerative everything | We’ve talked a lot about regenerative agriculture over the years and organizations like Kiss The Ground and Regenerate America continue to drive change forward. We’re now seeing the regenerative movement move into fashion and healthcare.
Kiss The Ground just announced a new regenerative cotton farming initiative with luxury denim brand, Citizens of Humanity that will roll out in the brands’ 2023 collections. LA womenswear brand, Christy Dawn is also leading the way, establishing their own regenerative cotton farm from which many of their pieces are made.
Giving less F*cks | (I can’t tell you how many ‘f*cks’ we’ve painstakingly edited out of interviews from people you love and trust here on the site. Despite it’s shock value to a good cross-section of readers, there’s just nothing in the English language that conveys the punch worthy of this burgeoning sentiment in 2023.)
After the greatest groundswell of connectivity in human history, we are experiencing a healthy retraction. Most individuals have made drastic (or even subtle) edits to their social relationships and overall social calendars. Thousands have left city life for good, and some of the biggest trends of last year had to do with our changing relationship to the workplace.
People are staying in, building boundaries, and being more mindful about where they spend their energy. It may not seem like a wellness issue at first, but the ramifications of this trend run deep when it comes to our emotional and mental well-being. The ramifications for brands and services in our space are also significant, as consumers experience these meaningful lifestyle shifts.
Lymphatic health | We’ve been covering lymphatic massage, dry brushing, foam rolling, gua sha and more for years now, but, somehow, in 2022, lymphatic health finally went mainstream. Most lymphatic health practices are pretty visual, so we’re guessing that Tiktok is partly to blame, however, don’t let its trendy nature dissuade you from learning more and making this a focus of your personal practice. On this topic, we’re huge fans of lymphatic health pro, Lisa Gainsley, body worker, Lauren Roxburgh, traditional Chinese medicine pro, Sandra Lanshin, and the women of Wildling. Dig in and find a pro or practice that resonates with you.
fashion Trends in fitnesswear | We can’t talk about trends without talking about fashion. On TCM, fashion shows up in two ways; sustainability and fitnesswear.
Per our notes above, brands like Christy Dawn and Citizens of Humanity are embracing regenerative farming at a rapid rate we didn’t expect to see for years. Expect more sustainable fashion coverage from us all year.
When it comes to fitnesswear, we expect to see the loungewear trend stay as strong as ever. Top fashion trends like head-to-toe monochrome color, throwback streetwear, cutouts, midriff-bearing tops, and bike shorts all promise to stay with us. Mermaidcore, Barbiecore and all the other ‘cores’, easily find their place in fitwear sets from Carbon38 to Girlfriend Collective and beyond.
I also loved seeing this take on leggings on recent runways from WhoWhatWear fashion editor, Sierra Mayhew, which I think is spot on! Layered under coats or sized up and worn in fashion colors, this trend has legs.
Sculptural quirk at home | Last, but not least, I love to include design in our trend forecasting, as good design is such an important brand value for us. After all, one of the biggest trends in wellness overall this decade has been the incorporation of modern design trends!
While most design and fashion forecasters have been calling for drama as a backlash to pandemic-era calmness, I foresee many more years of close-to-nature styling, organic shapes, timeless neutral colors and a nod to ancient cultures and patterns. That need for drama will likely be expressed in the burgeoning trend of sculptural quirk we’re seeing lately in statement lighting, oversized objects, and unusual natural textures and patterns in marble, stone and wall-coverings.
At home, we continue to see a boom in office and gym renovations. See one of our recent favorites here. Home equipment newbies like Frame’s digitally-driven reformer, and the rise in popularity of home fitness instructors from Melissa Wood Tepperberg to Lia Bartha of the B Method mean that working out from home has never been so fun.
What did I miss? Tell us in the comments! Look forward to our massive reader poll later this winter as we take stock of all the big changes we’ve all been through and what you’re looking forward to finding our pages in 2023.
