Forget yoga, meditation or wild swimming. Today’s booming wellness trend is sexual wellness. Bloomingdales, the popular New York department store, jumped on the bandwagon last week by announcing it was launching its own online sexual wellness store, offering a collection of the “ultimate self-buy.” love essentials” including vibrators, massagers, body lotions, lubricants and creams.
The adventurous flagship store move follows major retailers, such as Boots and Ocado here in the UK, in creating dedicated spaces on their websites for sexual pleasure, allowing consumers to add lube and vibrating rings into their store weekly.
This open stance on sexual wellness is certainly a refreshing change from the days of sneakily grabbing a sex toy from a blacked-out Ann Summers store and experts say the pandemic — and our forced time at home – is very much to blame.
During the first lockdown, the search term “sexual wellbeing” increased by 850% on beauty site Cult Beauty, while chic sexual pleasure brand Smile Makers, which makes colourful, ultra-soft, silicone vibrators danger to the body, saw his daily income double.
“There is nothing like a global threat to humanity and the absence of touch and physical contact to make you feel what it is to be human,” says Dominique Karetsos, CEO and founder of The Healthy Pleasure Group, a global organization dedicated to sexual health. and the technology industry. “It made us take stock of our lives and think about what’s important: intimacy, sexual contact, personal pleasure, desire and communication. Sexual wellness is not just about the sexual act or performance, but also about thinking about our body, mind and pleasure from a holistic perspective. This has been the positive side of the pandemic and has helped dismantle old taboos.
While the pandemic may have fueled the sexual wellness trend, the MeToo movement, Karetsos admits, most likely started it.
“Women’s health has been ignored for years, but the MeToo movement has played an important role in opening the debate and putting women’s empowerment and “self-love and self-care” back on the agenda. “, explains Karetsos. “Retailers were then driven by consumer interest and wanted to work with female-led, body-positive brands to shape a whole new category of sexual wellness. »
Thanks to technological advancements and digital innovation, this category has expanded far beyond the simple vibrator and embraced sexual wellness in its entirety.
As a result, websites such as Boots, Feelunique and Look Fantastic began offering all kinds of products, from mood-enhancing candles, massage oils and intimate cleansers to lubricating water for women menopausal and softening formulas for pubic hair.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s brand Goop was ahead of all this, leading the charge in sexual wellness well before the pandemic, generating press interest by selling products like vagina-scented candles and jade eggs that could be inserted into the vagina for pleasure. .
“We have Goop to thank for shining a light on the conversation in its own ironic way,” says Karetsos. “Education is key and celebrities can be helpful in opening up the debate, showing that sexual wellness shouldn’t just revert to the phallic or focus on performance with women feeling pressured to orgasm in 60 seconds It’s about having a conscious conversation about consent, self-awareness and desire.
Part of this new sexual revolution, Karetsos says, is teaching children to name their body parts from a young age.
“Children should be able to name a vulva like an elbow or an eyebrow,” she says. “We need to provide them with this language so that it all starts with self-esteem and not, as it used to be, with shame. Sexual wellness is a journey that men and women can take their entire lives, well into their 80s or 90s – intimacy, desire, and self-love only stop when you stop breathing .
Chloé Mackintosh, the founder of Kamaa sexual wellness platform for all ages based on the scientific idea that pleasure equals health, refers to the sexual wellness trend as the third cycle of wellness.
“Twenty years ago, it all started with an awareness of our physical health and the importance of exercise, diet and nutrition, and with the realization that what we put into our body has an impact on it,” she explains. “Then the stress and anxiety exploded and we realized we couldn’t feel good in our bodies if our minds and heads weren’t in the right place and mental health became a priority.”
Sexual health, says Mackintosh, is only the third major change in wellbeing, although it has taken more than 15 years to break the taboo.
“For a long time, sex was considered a vice, like gambling and weed, and investors weren’t interested in it,” she explains. “But then social media started opening up the conversation and Gen Z broke taboos, talked about fluid identity or identified as non-binary and started waking up to the fact that we weren’t getting the intimacy or satisfaction we wanted.”
According to Mackintosh, people still have no idea what they’re missing when it comes to sex. “We are at five percent of our potential in terms of pleasure. Doctors or medical professionals are not interested in pleasure, but it is the best antidote to stress and gives us the ability to relax and restore ourselves.
Kama’s mantra is “Become a better lover” and the app includes things like a 15-minute step-by-step guided masturbation practice and a lesson on how to give a blowjob while having fun. These tools for female satisfaction are designed to shift the mentality away from the pornographic and shaming perception of sex that most of us grew up with and replace it with a no-holds-barred approach that views sex through a normalized lens.
Sex and relationship psychotherapist Miranda Hume-Christophers is thrilled that such tools now exist for public consumption and that we have finally reached a time where we are able to openly embrace our sexuality.
“Sexual pleasure has many overall benefits because it simply makes people feel good,” says Hume-Christophers. “Trying to understand what makes you come alive as a sexual being and asking questions like, ‘What do I like to wear?’ What do I like to do? can create enthusiasm and energy and improve your relationship, confidence and self-esteem. It is important to realize that sex is a simplistic form of pleasure and a fundamental part of being human, just like working, eating or drinking.
Hume-Christophers works with many clients who grew up feeling uncomfortable about sex and were led to think their desires were something to be ashamed of or not prioritized.
“Sex is often something that couples have to put aside in their lives and my job is to help them see sex and sexual intimacy in a way that is not shameful and accept that,” she says. “The growing understanding over the last year that sexual wellness is crucial to our emotional, physical and relational well-being has certainly been helpful and is going to make this conversation much easier in the future.”
