If you have ever spent more than five minutes on Instagram, you’ll probably be familiar with the sleek pink packages that indicate someone has bought something from Glossier. The company, an American cosmetics brand founded in 2010, has become famous not only for its products, but also for its aesthetic: cutesy, minimalist pastel packaging expertly targeted at the perfect millennial customer. As with many brands, what you are actually getting doesn’t always seem to matter: photographing it, being seen to have it, is what you are paying for.
Legions of brands have followed Glossier’s example: at first, other cosmetic companies, then homeware, lifestyle and more. Now, it seems, the Glossierification of everyday life is finally complete, as the telemedicine brands Hims and Hers neatly show.
As the names suggest, the brands are aimed at men and women respectively: Hims selling pharmaceuticals to promote hair growth and treat sexual dysfunction, Hers offering birth control and skincare products. The company was launched with much fanfare.One business site dubbed it “Goop for men” – and it’s obvious that plenty of time, attention and money has gone into its branding. A quick glance at the two brands’ Instagrams and you are greeted with the slickness of any self-respecting wellness brand.
In recent days, it has launched two offerings: sertraline – an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor), which it, rather nauseatingly, says will help “lengthen you and your partner’s sexy time” (delayed orgasm is a side-effect of the antidepressant) – and propranolol, a beta blocker, to help with situational anxiety.
The furious reaction this prompted on social media was not a surprise (the company has now apologised). For one, it’s dangerous – people should probably not be able to obtain psychiatric medication online via an opaque consultation system. In one tweet, Hers says the site is “so chill” it’s like “shopping for leggings, not prescription meds” – not stopping to think the two experiences should be antithetical by default.
It’s also egregious in other ways – why should a company be profiting from this? Of course, pharmaceutical firms have been doing this for years, and it’s no different just because the company describes itself as a startup. But its prevalence is new and only increasing.
It’s a pattern we have seen before, not least with feminism, which has had a remarkable transformation over the last few years. Once a dirty word, feminism has been cleaned up and made palatable, the concept of empowerment now divorced of any real meaning and used instead to sell us things. Once upon a time, a teenager would have been teased for calling herself a feminist: now, she can buy a £19.99 T-shirt declaring The Future Is Female from any high street shop. An earnest International Women’s Day post on social media is more or less essential for any company that wants to appear woke – which is all of them.
And now it’s happening to mental health. As Eva Wiseman wrote this week for the Observer, the “anxiety economy” is thriving: apps and online courses, products designed to ease our stress and cure our depression. Self-care, once a fairly basic principle used to describe the act of looking after oneself, has become an economic behemoth, used to sell products and lifestyles that only serve to alienate us further from our inner lives. In the past year alone, I’ve been matter-of-factly informed by various public relations professionals that mental illness can be stopped in its tracks by subscription meal boxes, supplements, going for brunch, lunchboxes, posters and, once, blackout blinds.
Lots of this is perniciously gendered, and it’s no different here. As you might expect from a business called Hims, its marketing is hardly progressive – adverts for propranolol targeted at women suggested it could “cure first-date nerves”, while male-targeted ads promised it would help deal with board meetings and public speaking. Many of Hers’ Instagram posts also play on the “badass woman” tropes of neoliberal feminism – which, as we’ve seen, had a similar social trajectory to that which mental health is on now.
It’s an oft-repeated truism that the advertising industry likes to create problems in order to sell us their solutions: it’s hard to look at Hims and Hers and not feel this is at least a little accurate. Being nervous before a date or meeting is perfectly normal, and encouraging people to buy beta blockers online to deal with those nerves is just pathologising something that is simply part of normal existence. Enough people struggle with their mental health in a way that impacts their ability to cope; businesses shouldn’t be able to prey on what are just the ups and downs of a nuanced emotional life.
Companies have long been mining profits from diagnosis – mentally ill people and psychiatrists alike have raged for years about the influence the pharmaceutical industry has had not only on our treatment of mental illness, but also our conception of it. Hims and Hers don’t look like GlaxoSmithKline or Pfizer; they don’t talk like them, either. But underneath the pastel-pink graphic design and Insta-friendly quotes exhorting us to lean in and love ourselves, they are just the same. The answers to our questions about how to live a joyful life cannot be found on Instagram and nor can they be sold – and that’s never going to change, no matter how it’s packaged.
• Emily Reynolds is the author of A Beginner’s Guide to Losing Your Mind
• In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org. You can contact the mental health charity Mind by calling 0300 123 3393 or visiting mind.org.uk. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be be found here.
