Unilever Wellbeing chief says beauty and wellness lines are blurring

Speaking on stage at the Groceryshop conference in Las Vegas this week, Unilever Wellbeing CEO Jostein Solheim said the company is betting on a continued convergence of beauty and wellness, a shift he tied to GLP-1 weight-loss drugs and AI-driven health data reshaping what consumers want from brands.

Solheim traced the change across roughly a decade, arguing that beauty was once defined largely by appearance. He described two broad shifts in how people think about diet and health: first came goals built around weight and health management aimed at preventing future illness, and then came a merging of beauty and wellbeing, with consumers concluding that feeling good inside is a precondition for feeling beautiful.

More recently, he said, consumers have taken greater agency over their own health and woven wellness into their daily lives rather than treating it as a separate pursuit from looking good.

That integration, Solheim said, creates room for brands to form deeper relationships with customers instead of competing only on surface-level appearance claims.

For a business of Unilever's scale, the practical implication is that looking good and feeling good are increasingly treated as a single purchase occasion rather than two distinct categories.