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Celebrities : Why Do They Love Bizarre Fads?
BBC Focus - Science & Technology
|November 2021
Why are famous stars so drawn to the allure of questionable health products and trends?
In 2019, Josh Brolin, celebrated actor and star of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, ended up with a sunburnt anus.
This unlikely but true sentence was made possible by the bizarre wellness fad of ‘perineum sunning’ (exposing the patch of skin between the anus and genitals to direct sunlight). It’s just one of the countless wellness fads, fashionable diets, and questionable products and procedures that claim to improve your health and appearance that are everywhere in our modern world. Others include ‘vampire facials’ (injecting your own purified blood into your face), coffee enemas (self explanatory) and the treasure trove of dubiousness that is Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop company.
Such fads and practices often make grand claims about the health benefits they offer, but seldom offer any robust evidence for them.
And yet, despite all this, they persist. If anything, they’re more popular than ever. It’s a bleakly regular occurrence, for an A-list actor, high profile celebrity, and now even Instagram influencer, to claim that they’ve discovered some new way to improve health, wellness, or restore lost youth. And, despite it typically being extremely unscientific, ridiculous, embarrassing, even actively harmful, and the person advocating having no medical training or expertise whatsoever, countless people embrace it, as if it were the elixir of life and the fountain of eternal youth combined.
This story is from the November 2021 edition of BBC Focus - Science & Technology.
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