On a Saturday night in January at Le Relais Plaza, an upscale brasserie in Paris’s 8th arrondissement, I witnessed a French man send back a tower of butter and ask for olive oil. I wouldn’t have believed it had I not seen it with my own eyes.
Observing an actual Parisian rejecting butter—one of France’s holy trinity of dairy products, along with cheese and crème fraîche—was a window into the new wellness culture seeping into what might have been the world’s last bastion of free-flowing wine and glutinous bread. Butter is not the only thing being banished: Matthieu Carlin, the pastry chef at the Hôtel de Crillon, is scaling back on the sugar in his pastries. “Less sugar doesn’t mean less indulgence,” Carlin assures. “It means a purer expression of flavor, more fruit, and a more refined taste.”
Let’s not get carried away. Paris hasn’t gone full Erewhon, the high-end California market where grocery bills can easily reach $800 for a modest haul. No one here is paying $19 for a single strawberry; fresh food is still relatively affordable. There aren’t med spas—yet—on every corner. But still, in Paris, there’s a newly increased awareness and interest—and therefore an economy—dedicated to feeling your best. And not only through month-long vacations and pains au chocolat. The French wellness market grew 8.4% from 2023 to 2024 to over $210 billion. It now ranks sixth in the world. (The United States ranks first, with a market size of $2.1 trillion.)
It’s strange to see the French shy away from dairy and embrace new-age practices like meditation—wellness routines that seem quintessentially American—after decades of messaging about how the French do pretty much everything better than we do. In the US, there’s an entire cottage industry of bestselling self-help books dedicated to this very topic: French Women Don’t Get Fat, Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, The French Beauty Solution. The key here is that even as the French embrace facets of the American industry wellness complex, they’re showing an uncanny ability to beat America at its own game—by proving that well-being isn’t a race to be won.
Martine Assouline, a New Yorker with a Parisian cultural background and founder of the eponymous luxury publishing company, puts it like this: “In Paris, wellness is often quiet and woven into daily life—walking, lingering over a meal, conversations that stretch, time that isn’t treated like a competition. In Paris, the café terrace isn’t a guilty pleasure: it’s practically neuroscience. In the US, wellness is more goal-driven: discipline, performance, beauty, optimization. It can be empowering, but it can also become another pressure point.”
