Hiya! Here’s your monthly Orchidea Newsletter — packed with business insights, practical tips, and visual inspiration to help beauty and wellness brands shine.

JOYFICATION, remember this word for 2026. Right now it lives in small marketing circles, but next year everyone will pretend they used it first.

Joyfication = wellness as a coping strategy.

We’re living in permanent “background stress mode”. Around 79% of employees report moderate-to-high stress, and more than 60% show symptoms of burnout like exhaustion and disengagement.

Of course people are not solving this with another beige capsule and a Google Doc habit tracker. They’re chopping the day into tiny, controllable pockets of “this feels nice, at least” — the 9 p.m. magnesium drink, the 3 p.m. brain gummy, the shower that smells like a dessert.

Sensory stuff is no longer “extra” – it’s doing real work. Around 70–80% of beauty and personal care users say texture and scent strongly influence whether they enjoy a product, and more than 60% admit they’re more likely to repurchase something that feels good to use, even when the formula is similar on paper.

So if it tastes good, smells good, looks good and makes a tiny joke at you from the pack? The brain quietly files it under: this must be doing something.

Even if it’s 50% placebo, the nervous system still gets a break.

ALICE

NO LONGER MATCHES YOUR AMBITION

Alice makes functional mushroom chocolates infused with Lion’s Mane, Reishi and Cordyceps, plus other nootropics and adaptogens, to support cognitive clarity, emotional balance and sustained energy.

So on the box it’s “nootropic and adaptogenic support”.
In your hand it’s just…really good chocolate.

Real melt, proper texture, not “healthy snack that tastes like compromise”. Day bar vs Night bar: same format, different story (get things done / shut the brain down).

⬜️ Behind this, the functional mushroom market isn’t small either: worth about $16.9B in 2024 and projected to hit around $45.7B by 2034 at roughly 10% annual growth.

So you’ve got a booming “brain + mood” narrative, and they chose to deliver it as a dessert ritual. That’s Joyfication in its purest form: the dose is wrapped inside something you actively crave.

GUMMIES

FOR YOUR INNER CHILD

Gummies are the obvious Joyfication poster child.

◻️  The gummy supplements market is forecast to reach about $47.8B by 2030, up from $24.4B in 2025, growing at around 14% CAGR. Another estimate has it at $38.1B by 2030, still solid growth. Whatever the exact number, direction is only one: up.

• NOON sits in the “cognitive wellness” corner – a team of neuroscientists and functional doctors making dual-layer Mushroom Gummy Delights for focus, energy, calm and sleep, marketed as “powerful, delightful rituals where neuroscience meets nature”.

• Hims / Hers sell wild-cherry biotin gummies for hair, skin and nails, explicitly “developed with doctors and confectioners” and free from artificial flavours.

On the label: vitamins, biotin, mushrooms, function. In the mouth: candy.

SOFT SERVICES

SHOWER AS AFFOGATO FANTASY

Soft Services built their name on being body skin experts in combination with artsy unexpected solutions for each product in design.

Then they dropped Affogato L’Orange Buffing Bar:

Functioanlly: a mild-to-moderate microcrystal exfoliating brick for the body, with the same hero ingredients as their original Buffing Bar, aimed at rough skin and keratosis pilaris.

Emotionally: it smells like freshly poured espresso + vanilla–coconut cream + Italian citrus. The fragrance is literally described as an affogato in scent form. And bring you to Italy in seconds.

So you’re doing a very functional thing – managing texture – but the emotional memory is “tiny Italian café fantasy in shower”.

It’s still a problem–solution product.
They just decided the solution should feel like a dessert scene, not a boring routine.

MOON JUICE

MAGNESIUM AS NIGHTLY MOCKTAIL

Moon Juice’s Magnesi-Om is technically a magnesium powder: three bioavailable forms of magnesium plus L-theanine, positioned for relaxation, brain health and regularity.

The line that matters is how they frame it: “meditation you can sip.”

It dissolves in water, often mixed into tart cherry juice or sparkling water.
Comes in soft, friendly flavours (berry, citrus etc.), zero sugar.

And it lives very nicely inside the whole Sleepy Girl Mocktail culture – the viral bedtime drink built from tart cherry juice, magnesium powder and soda that’s been all over TikTok and media since 2023. Pretty glass, ice cubes, slow stirring, “look at me having a nervous-system-friendly nightcap” moment.

On Amazon, Magnesi-Om sits around the top 60 magnesium supplements and in the top few thousand of all Health & Household products, which is not bad for something that markets itself as a mood-y ritual, not a pharmacy basic.

Meanwhile magnesium is having its own PR moment: every other TikTok is about stress, sleep, bowel movements, PMS, and magnesium is framed as the quiet hero in google search.

Moon Juice isn’t selling “300 mg magnesium citrate”.
They’re selling a nightly role, the drink that tells your brain it’s done for the day.

WHY THIS MATTERS IF YOU’RE BUILDING A BRAND

This isn’t just a “fun packaging trend”. JOYFICATION is basically the nervous system calling the shots.

A few uncomfortable truths:

◻️  People are exhausted. Burnout keeps hitting record levels – one 2024 study showed 82% of white-collar knowledge workers across regions felt burnt out.

◻️  Preventive wellness is huge, but attention is tiny. The things that win are the ones that feel good now, not in 10 years when your biomarkers improve.

◻️  Formats with built-in joy (gummies, functional chocolate, sensorial body care, mocktail-style powders) are growing faster than traditional “two capsules with water”.

So if your products still behaves like medicine, it’s competing with the hospital.
If it behaves like joy, it’s competing with lipstick, coffee and perfume, the tiny objects people actually use to survive their week.

That, in one word — JOYFICATION.

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Cheers, Orchidea team