Wellness has become the status symbol of the rich and, presumably, healthy — from Hailey Bieber’s Erewhon smoothie to $10,000-a-month clubs and six-figure longevity clinics.
“What actually happened was that I went into Erewhon just to order a regular smoothie, and then I posted the smoothie on my [Instagram] story,” Hailey Bieber told GQ of the 2022 post that made a twenty-dollar drink a celebrity in its own right. Her Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie, created to promote her Rhode skincare line, went on to sell more than 40,000 cups a month at its peak. “The demographic of the girls flying from San Francisco to stand in front of Erewhon Beverly Hills with Hailey Bieber smoothies, taking a picture of Erewhon and tagging Hailey,” the grocer’s executive vice president Vito Antoci told the magazine. “The fan girls really make these drinks viral.”
The Erewhon smoothie may be pricey, but it is, by all accounts, one of the cheapest tickets into a status contest the wealthy now wage through wellness, one that runs from a green juice to a six-figure longevity membership and is remaking real estate, travel, and private clubs along the way.
Wellness as a status symbol
The global wellness economy reached $6.8 trillion in 2024, up 7.9 percent from the year before, according to the Global Wellness Institute, which puts it at 6.1 percent of global GDP, larger than global tourism or information technology and roughly 60 percent the size of what the world spends on health care. Traditional luxury, though? It moved the other way. The personal luxury goods market fell 2 percent in 2024, its first decline since the Great Recession outside of the pandemic, and its customer base shrank by about 50 million people over two years, as shoppers kept “favoring personal treatment and wellness over tangible goods,” Bain & Company and Altagamma reported. “Luxury spending has shown remarkable stability this year, despite macroeconomic uncertainty, largely driven by consumers’ appetite for luxury experiences,” said Claudia D’Arpizio, the Bain partner who led the study.
Silvia Bellezza, a marketing professor at Columbia Business School, has studied why the rich increasingly signal status through their bodies rather than their closets. The wealthy who once broadcast rank with a high-end fur, bag, or car, Fortune wrote of her argument, have shifted toward intangible assets like health, part of a long dematerialization of status symbols. “You’re not working, but you’re also doing something productive; you’re working on your body or your look or trying to preserve your age forever,” she told Fortune.
The money is concentrating in the most exclusive corners. Wellness real estate, the residences built around clean air, natural light, and private fitness, reached $548 billion in 2024 and is the fastest-growing wellness sector, expanding about 19.5 percent a year. Wellness tourism runs to $894 billion, personal care and beauty to $1.35 trillion, and spas to another $157 billion. The personalized-medicine market, fed by longevity-seeking consumers rushing to diagnostic testing, has reached $147 billion and is growing more than 9 percent a year; the United States mental-wellness market alone is worth $125 billion.
The rise of the wellness clubs
Private clubs have turned the gym into a velvet rope. The New York club The Well charges from $355 a month; Remedy Place, with clubs in New York, Los Angeles, and Boston, runs $300 to $2,250; and New York’s Continuum Club opened in 2024 at $10,000 a month, capped at 100 members, Fortune reported. “The smaller the ‘in’ group and the harder it is to get access, the higher the signaling power of that belongingness,” Bellezza told the magazine.
“Wellness has now become less of an I’m interested in wellness to a lifestyle choice,” Zack Bates, chief executive of Private Club Marketing, told Fortune. Longevity clinics sit above them all. At Love.Life, the 45,000-square-foot El Segundo longevity club co-created by Whole Foods co-founder John Mackey, a medical membership runs $9,000 a year and a concierge tier reportedly reaches $50,000. An annual membership at a chain like Fountain Life, which runs clinics in cities including New York, Dallas, and Houston, starts around $20,000, and the most comprehensive programs across the field run past $150,000.
Erewhon may be the accessible edge of all of it, selling celebrity smoothies and gussied-up water the way another store sells a handbag. It rotates sixteen branded drinks a year through its Tonic Bar, and charges roughly 60,000 members up to two hundred dollars a year for perks that include a free branded drink each month. Kourtney Kardashian, Rhode, and the toothpaste brand Boka have all paid to appear on a cup that customers photograph for free. When it sold a hundred-dollar kit to make Bieber’s smoothie at home, it sold out. The grocer, a certified B Corporation majority-owned by its founding family, announced three new Los Angeles stores in early 2025 and opened a tonic bar inside the New York members’ club Kith Ivy, its first foothold outside California, where the smoothies run twenty-five.
Wellness real estate is the fastest-growing luxury of all
The fastest-growing wellness sector is the one you live in. The Global Wellness Institute defines wellness real estate as “built environments proactively designed, built, and operated to support the holistic health of occupants, visitors, and the community,” and it has grown from $225 billion in 2019 to $548 billion in 2024, faster than any other part of the wellness economy. Homes built around clean air and water, natural light, quiet, and private fitness carry a price premium of 10 to 25 percent, by the institute’s analysis, and wellness-certified commercial buildings command a rental premium of 4.4 to 7.7 percent per square foot, drawing on MIT data. The claim is that the building itself will make you healthier, and the institute cites better sleep, more physical activity, and lower rates of chronic disease among occupants.
Sales opened this spring on Six Senses Residences Belize, sixteen overwater homes on a private island off Ambergris Caye, priced from $3.75 million and organized around a full spa, an oceanfront yoga pavilion, and treatments drawn from traditional Mayan practices. The hotel brands that once sold a week of wellness are now selling the real estate. “People are looking for year-round warm climate and convenience to a tropical escape with access to unique experiences and excursions,” John Turley, a development partner on the project, said in its launch announcement.
Is any of it worth it?
Longevity clinics sell NAD, a coenzyme marketed as an anti-aging fix, as intravenous drips that run $200 to upwards of $1,000 a session. “There’s almost no published data,” NPR reported in May, and the injectable shots “haven’t been studied at all.” The researchers are blunt. “I think now the cart may be well ahead of the horse,” Christopher Martens, who directs the Delaware Center for Cognitive Aging Research, told the network.
“The data in humans are pretty iffy right now that it actually has significant benefits,” said Dr. Samuel Klein of Washington University in St. Louis. “We are still in the early stages of human studies,” added Dr. Shalender Bhasin of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, “and the health benefits of augmenting NAD+ are yet to be established in large human studies.”
The Strawberry Glaze, for all its sea moss and collagen, carries the sugar of a dessert, and it sold anyway. “All you b*tches think this is healthy, but this is just a milkshake,” the singer Chappell Roan said, sipping an Erewhon matcha, in a clip that circulated last year.
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