Wellness

In today’s fast-paced world, taking time for yourself is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity. Whether you’re dealing with everyday stress, muscle tension, or simply the need to disconnect, a visit to a spa offers a unique escape. From soothing massages to...

Wellness Every wellness trend that promises to undo something modern deserves the same question: what did the research actually measure? Barefoot running is the best test case I know, because the science behind it is real, widely quoted, and says something narrower...

Wellness Beauty fasting arrived with an appealing story attached: that our skin has become dependent on the twelve products we pile on it, and that taking everything away lets it reset. Half of that story stands up. The half doing the heavy lifting in the marketing...

Wellness There is an enormous amount of waiting on a shoot. Lights get rebuilt, a lens goes missing, someone has to drive back for a memory card, and the rest of us sit. I used to scroll. The stylist I work with most often knits, and after roughly two years of...

Wellness A 7am call means a 4:30 alarm, and by two in the afternoon I am doing precision work on somebody's eyeline with the reflexes of a woman who has been awake for ten hours. Every freelancer I know has a version of that hour. What changed my mind about napping...

Wellness I once worked out that on a busy shoot day I eat standing in a corridor, out of a foil tray, in under seven minutes, usually while answering a message about call times. Then I go home and wonder why I want to eat again at nine. Mindful eating is the idea that...

Wellness In eight years of doing other people's faces, the single most repeated sentence I have heard in the chair is that cold water closes your pores. It does not. That sentence is also the reason I went looking properly at the cold shower challenge, because if the...

Wellness Last summer I watched a woman cross Sefton Park barefoot, shoes hooked over one finger, entirely unbothered. Twenty minutes later she was still barefoot on the pavement outside the café, and that was the bit that made me wince. Those are two different...

Wellness The studio where I do a Saturday yoga class has started putting gong baths on the timetable, and those slots go before the yoga does. I booked one mostly to find out what people were queueing for. Then I went and read what the research actually says, because...

Wellness You have probably seen the line that reading for six minutes cuts your stress by 68 per cent. I quoted it myself for years. It comes from a 2009 piece of research by Mindlab International, it involved sixteen volunteers, it was commissioned by a chocolate...

Wellness Here is the least romantic finding in travel research. A meta-analysis published in the Journal of Occupational Health in 2009 pooled the studies on holidays and found that health and wellbeing do improve while you are away, and then fade out within roughly...

Wellness WRAP, the UK waste and resources charity, surveyed British wardrobes and found the average adult owns around 118 items of clothing, of which roughly 31 have not been worn in at least a year. Nationally that adds up to about 1.6 billion unworn garments. I read...

Wellness In October 2022 the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities published survey work carried out by Censuswide on just over 4,000 adults in England. Sixty-seven per cent said they regularly get the Sunday scaries, and among 18 to 24 year olds it was 74 per...

Wellness I started carrying a bag on my Sunday run because of a single stretch of pavement near Sefton Park that never seemed to get cleared. Six months in, I know exactly which junction collects the most cigarette ends, and I have opinions about litter pickers I...

Wellness Half the kit bags on set now contain a gua sha stone, and at least one model a month tells me about the rice water rinse her grandmother swore by. I have spent a while working out which of these old rituals actually holds up under a bright light and a camera,...

Wellness My phone is my portfolio, my booking system and half my client conversations, so every time someone tells me to switch it off for a week I want to ask who is going to pay my invoices. Three women who tried a proper digital detox told us what it did for them,...