In a world where the pursuit of good health increasingly takes center stage, there's no better gift than one that embodies the essence of self-care. Wellness isn’t just about getting regular check-ups and vaccinations. In addition to supporting physical health, the best wellness gifts promote holistic improvements to everyday life.
These 30 gift ideas foster connections between physical health, mental well-being, and emotional balance to help the most important people in your life be healthier and happier. From science-backed skincare to luxurious relaxation aids, our favorite wellness gifts are sure to delight everyone on your shopping list—and inspire them to be their best selves.
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The Best Wellness Gifts
- An All-in-One Face Fixer: TheraFace Pro Facial Massager
- A Weighted Blanket to Smother Your Anxiety: Bearaby Hand-Knit Weighted Blanket
- A Breath of Fresh (Moist) Air: Levoit LV600S Smart Warm and Cool Mist Humidifier
- A Bit of Peace And Quiet: Loop Experience Plus Earplugs
- A Wellness Wearable That Helps You Train Smarter, Not Harder: Whoop 4.0 Fitness Band (With One Year Subscription)
The Expert: I’ve been writing about health and science since 2012 for outlets like The Washington Post and Popular Science. I also spent several years overseeing Popular Science’s Personal Care selections for the outlet’s annual “Best of What’s New” Awards. In addition to my professional experience in researching mental and physical wellness, I’ve also spent lots of my own time exploring the best products for aiding health and relaxation. As a chronically ill person who deals with a lot of pain and fatigue, I’ve tried (or read tons of reviews of) pretty much every wellness gizmo there is!
What to Consider
Make Sure Your Gift Actually Works
Unfortunately, the worlds of beauty and personal care products are rife with bogus marketing claims and shoddy “science-backed” ingredients. When shopping for a wellness gift, keep an eye out for claims that seem too good to be true—They probably are. Cosmetic companies don’t have to prove their claims to any particular agency, and supplements are unregulated in the United States.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t genuinely innovative, effective, and safe products out there. But you should make sure companies back up their claims with third-party testing—or that the active ingredients they’re highlighting have been studied for their wellness properties.
That being said, there’s nothing wrong with using something that may or may not be full of powerful ingredients. The placebo effect is real, and the mere ritual of using a wellness product daily can be enough to yield the results you’re looking for. But it’s always a good idea to do some searching on the active ingredients in the products you’re considering to make sure they don’t carry risks.
Learn About Their Wellness Goals
The pursuit of wellness isn’t just about improving certain metrics of “health.” It’s about making holistic choices that improve your overall well being. Unless you’re a doctor buying a gift for your patient (which would be… interesting), you probably don’t have much intel on what your giftee should be doing to, say, improve their cholesterol levels. Giving someone a gift is not an excuse to make assumptions about their health needs or goals, so steer clear of anything too prescriptive.
The best wellness gifts support the people in your life and the wellness journey they’re already on. Focus on what you know they enjoy doing, or that they’ve expressed interest in exploring. In other words: for the love of Pete, don’t ever buy someone a scale or a diet aid unless they specifically ask you to.
Will They Use It?
Most products that promise some kind of wellness benefit carry the same caveat: They work best if they’re used consistently. The fanciest face laser in the world won’t make your skin look any younger if it sits unused in your medicine cabinet. If you’re buying someone a wellness gift, make sure you have a good understanding of their current health, beauty, and fitness routines. The best wellness gifts will simplify some of the steps of their daily regimen, boost the effectiveness of an activity they already partake in, or make them more likely to stick to a good habit they’re trying to form.
How We Selected These Gift Ideas
Most of these wellness gift ideas are devices and products I’ve personally tested after doing extensive research to find the best version of a particular tool. In some cases, I tested multiple products before landing on a favorite. A few of them were selected based on trusted recommendations from doctors, physical therapists and stylists, or crowdsourced from Reddit threads and existing reviews.
Have you ever used a massage gun and wondered how dangerous it would be to use it on your face? If not, I envy your lack of jaw tension. If you have, I’ve got great news: The TheraFace Pro 4-in-1 therapy massage device is perfectly designed to hammer your facial muscles into submission without busting your teeth. This handy little gadget uses the same percussive technology as the Theragun to provide relaxing facial massages.
A variety of easy-to-swap attachments make the TheraFace a sort of wellness Swiss army knife. With one head, just-gentle-enough pulsations can help relieve TMJ pain and migraines. Another attachment provides microcurrent therapy, where small currents of electricity stimulate facial muscles to make skin appear more firm.
There’s even a gentle scrubbing head to improve your face washing routine. There’s also an LED ring with red, blue and infrared light treatments to rejuvenate tired skin, reduce fine lines and diminish irritation and acne.
For an extra-luxe upgrade, snag the optional heated and cooling attachment heads. Together they can relieve tension, increase circulation, ease muscle spasms and reduce inflammation.
Need to massage more than just your face? Then it’s time to bring out the big guns. Percussive massagers can help you recover more quickly from workouts, injuries, and stress. TheraGun has a well-earned reputation for making the best massage guns on the market, and its latest flagship model, the 6th-generation Theragun Pro Plus, combines Therabody’s deepest-ever level of percussion with a suite of other useful features.
The Pro Plus offers three levels of vibration therapy, which makes it versatile. While the pounding movement of a traditional percussive massager is great for soothing muscles, it’s not suitable for use on bone. Vibration is a safer and more effective alternative for massaging aching knees and shins.
In addition to percussion therapy, the Theragun Pro Plus features a LED light to promote circulation and healing, as well as several heated settings to soothe aches and pains. The fact that it can guide you through breath-work exercises while you massage yourself is just the icing on the wellness cake.
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If you’re not looking to splurge on a massage gun—let alone trips to see a human masseuse—this wearable shoulder and neck massager is a great alternative. The design allows you to pull the massage heads deeper into your body by simply tugging the straps down with your arms, giving you a surprisingly powerful massage.
You can adjust the speed and direction of the eight turning massage nodes, as well as the intensity of the infrared heating element. It even comes with a car adapter so you can use it on the go, though I don’t personally recommend turning it on when you’re behind the wheel.
With its ability to really dig into sore pressure points in the upper back, this massager doesn’t exactly make it easy to focus on the world around you. Plug in and relax with caution, folks.
Weighted blankets use so-called pressure therapy to induce a sense of calm. While the scientific evidence on their effectiveness is pretty scant, that’s mostly due to a lack of studies on the subject. Lots of experts recommend giving weighted blankets a try, because they’re anecdotally known to reduce anxiety in people with Autism Spectrum Disorder and ADHD.
My favorite weighted blanket brand is Bearaby. Its hand-knit, 100% cotton design means even the heaviest blankets allow plenty of air circulation to keep you from overheating. They’re also machine washable and look great with any style of decor.
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Dry air makes you crusty. It draws the moisture out of your skin, leaving it itchy and chapped. It also sucks your mucus membranes dry, which leaves you more vulnerable to upper respiratory infections. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the best way to protect your precious nostrils without encouraging the growth of mold and mildew is to keep indoor humidity levels at around 30 to 50 percent.
All of Levoit’s air purifiers and humidifiers get top marks from reviewers, but the LV600S Smart Warm and Cool Mist Humidifier is a great choice for most bedrooms. It uses a fine mist to quickly and efficiently moisten the air throughout a room of up to 753 square feet. You can even add aromatherapy oils to make your environment more zen.
Research shows that noise pollution—AKA the world being too loud—can stress us out enough to literally take years off of our lives. These high-fidelity, noise-reducing earplugs from Loop are designed to protect a user from excess noise without blocking out conversation.
Loop makes a wide array of ear plugs for different situations. The Loop Quiet design is meant to muffle all sound, making them perfect to wear while snoozing on an airplane. The Loop Experience, on the other hand, filters out just the loudest noises to make voices more clear. The Loop Experience Plus Earplugs offers the best of both worlds, adding a silicone filter that you can pop in and out to block extra noise.
Alone, the Experience Earplugs are perfect for taking in a loud concert without damaging your hearing, or for focusing in on a conversation in a crowded room. When the silicone inserts are added, you get an extra 5 dB of noise reduction to block out the world around you. Each pair comes with four sizes of silicone ear tips to ensure a perfect fit.
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7
A Wellness Wearable That Helps You Train Smarter, Not Harder
Whoop 4.0 Fitness Band (With One Year Subscription)
The market is cluttered with wellness wearables and smart watches that promise to optimize your athletic performance and sleep. Having tried loads of them over the years, the subscription-based Whoop 4.0 is my favorite by far.
Its data tracking and analysis are comprehensive enough that researchers have opted to use them in health studies. Anecdotally, I can say that it’s an incredibly popular wearable among people with chronic illness.
The Whoop focuses on active recovery, tracking metrics like heart rate variability (HRV) to encourage users to find the right balance of fitness and rest. HRV is the fluctuation in time between heartbeats, and research increasingly supports the idea that changes in HRV can indicate physical and mental stress.
The Whoop tracks heart rate and HRV with 99% accuracy, and combines this data with sleep tracking and other biometrics to provide “strain” and “recovery” scores. Color-coded recovery scores offer a clear indication of how much gas you’ve got left in the tank: If you’re in the green, it’s probably a good day to train a little harder. Yellow means you can carry on as usual. Red tells you to take it easy.
Meanwhile, your strain score suggests how much you should exert yourself to meet your goals—whether you’re training for a marathon or working to recover from an illness—and calculates your progress as you move throughout the day.
Whoop is a bit more of an investment than other fitness trackers, as it requires a monthly fee, but the integrated app offers a robust and ever-growing set of tools to support health and wellness. The Whoop Journal and Insight function allows you to input more than 140 behaviors like caffeine and alcohol consumption, using your phone in bed, and wearing blue-light glasses.
After a few days, your Whoop will tell you how your habits—good and bad—are affecting your performance. The new Whoop Coach function uses your data and a custom-built machine learning model to offer personalized workouts, nutrition plans and other wellness guidance.
Whoop is constantly conducting research with its user data, so you can expect the band’s functionality to keep growing over time.
The Bala Bangles are a coveted fitness accessory for a reason. These weighted cuffs—which fit around the wrists or ankles—look way more stylish than your average strength training aid. Each weight bar is made of steel wrapped in baby-soft silicone, so they’re as comfortable as they are trendy.
Whether your giftee is looking to add some resistance to their pilates routine or simply wants to turn every neighborhood stroll into a strength workout, these colorful cuffs are sure to add some style to their wellness routine.
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Sunscreen: It’s not just for days at the beach. But even knowing the importance of sun protection, many folks still struggle to remember to apply SPF daily. Brands like Vacation are working to change that, with playful products like its Baby Oil. Boomer parents and Y2K-obsessed tweens alike will be delighted by this unique sunscreen, which is formulated to mimic the ill-advised tanning oils of yesteryear.
Vacation’s signature “Baby Oil Accord” scent offers a sensory blast to the past, while ingredients like jojoba oil, chamomile, and Vitamin E hydrate and soothe sunbaked skin. And despite making your skin look as shiny and radiant as a babe in an 80’s beach movie, this product packs SPF30 sun protection.
If muscle beach vibes don’t feel quite right for your giftee, they’re sure to love Vacation’s whipped-cream-inspired sunblock.
Few things make a person feel less zen than chub rub. Megababe is an innovative brand focused on tackling the issue of sweat, and all the complications it creates. The brand's Body Dust is a talc-free, sweat-absorbing powder with a light, soothing scent.
It helps keep skin (and clothes) dry come hell or high water. This gift set includes a luxurious dust puff for application. Your giftee will feel glamorous as they kick chafing to the curb.
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LED masks have gotten a lot of hype over the last few years, and it’s not entirely unwarranted. There’s some evidence that red LED light can improve the look of skin by stimulating circulation and promoting the production of collagen. Blue LED light can help kill acne-causing bacteria to relieve breakouts.
CurrentBody’s red carpet approved light therapy mask features 132 LED bulbs and a flexible silicone body to ensure even coverage of the face. Users say they see brighter skin, more even skin tone, smoother wrinkles, and more with consistent use. Plus: it makes you look like a cool beauty robot.
A microfiber hair drying cloth is a gamechanger, but Aquis’ hair towels are in a league of their own. They feature a proprietary AQUITEX fabric that’s specially woven to wick moisture away from hair without creating any friction. That means less damage and less frizz. The Aquis Flip also incorporates tiny copper threads into its weave, adding antimicrobial properties that keep it from smelling musty as it dries.
The Aquis Towel is perfect for hand-scrunching wet curls to remove water without causing frizz, and the Aquis Wrap is designed to stay put on your head as you go about your routine. But the Aquis Flip’s added antimicrobial protection makes it the best hair towel I’ve ever owned. This will blow your long-haired loved ones away—and put their blow dryer to shame.
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Maintaining good sleep hygiene is a crucial part of staying healthy and well. The Hatch Restore 2 Sunrise Alarm Clock can help your giftee revolutionize their wakeup routine without stress.
This isn’t just another gadget to bring into the bedroom: Soothing sleep sounds, phone-free controls, and the ability to completely dim the clock’s display all ensure the Hatch Restore 2 will help your person sleep better. And by waking them up with a gradual, sunrise-mimicking light display, this alarm clock will support your giftee’s natural circadian rhythms.
Dermaplaning has gained a lot of traction thanks to fancy spa treatments that feature it, but it’s simple enough to do at home. The gist is that you shave the peach fuzz off of your face to achieve a smoother makeup look, but the process does double-duty by gently scraping away the top layer of dead skin cells.
This dermaplaning wand from Schick features a reusable handle with non-slip grips, making it perfect for skincare newbies and exfoliation enthusiasts alike. I particularly like the curved shape of the handle, which I find more ergonomic than that of others I’ve tried. I also love the combination of a sturdy, long-lasting handle with disposable heads.
Lots of dermaplane razors are entirely disposable and made of plastic, which feels like a waste and makes me prone to try to keep using them for too long. The razor heads of this model feature “micro guards” to protect your skin while you shave. I haven’t had any inadvertent Sweeney Todd moments yet!
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Steam may not literally “open” your pores– pores don’t open and shut–but it does loosen up the debris that’s stuck inside them and make it easier to extract. One of our favorite facial steamers, the Dr. Ennis Gross Pro, will help the skincare enthusiast in your life draw dirt and makeup out.
The highly-rated device is compact and portable, but features a wide nozzle designed to cover the whole face with soothing, pore-cleansing steam. While research on using steam for chronic sinus congestion isn’t very promising, some study subjects have reported that steam inhalation relieves their sinus headache symptoms.
Any good wellness routine should include plenty of stretching and other restorative movement. If your giftee doesn’t have a good foam roller yet, then the TriggerPoint Grid is a perfect choice.
I have a whole suite of foam rollers to handle everything from post-workout muscle aches to foot fatigue, but I reach for this one more often than not. It’s lightweight, thanks to its hollow core design, but the durable EVA foam on its outer edge offers a firmer surface than that of most rollers. Just like the hands of a massage therapist, the roller’s pressure will promote blood flow and speed up post-workout recovery.
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This viral showerhead lives up to its promises. The Jolie Filtered Showerhead captures chlorine, heavy metals and other contaminants. Cleaner shower water can do everything from soothing irritated skin to preventing hair damage and discoloration.
If your giftee complains about hard water in their home, suffers from conditions like eczema or psoriasis, or simply invests lots of time and money into their hair and skin routine, the Jolie will help them detox their daily shower.
Sitting too much can lead to back pain and a whole host of other health issues, but standing in place throughout the workday can lead to its own problems, like leg pain and an increased risk of heart disease.
Like most things, it’s best to sit and stand in moderation—and spend plenty of brief bursts walking around, too. If you want your loved one to have the healthiest work setup possible, make sure they have an adjustable-height desk and a treadmill. The stashable WalkingPad will be easy to whip out when they’re feeling the urge to get some steps in, but won’t preclude the use of a comfy office chair when it’s time to rest their feet.
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Seasonal Affective Disorder sucks, and it can compound its crappiness by draining you of the motivation to pursue all your favorite wellness activities. Luckily, light therapy offers a simple—and generally quite effective—solution.
So-called “happy lamps” mimic the intensity of the sun to remind the human brain that it’s daytime. This highly-rated and frequently recommended model from Verilux meets the recommended brightness threshold of 10,000 lux, so users only need to switch it on for 20 minutes or so each day to support higher energy levels and better mental health.
With a thin, tablet-like design and options for either standing the lamp upright or mounting it on a wall, the Verilux can put pep in your giftee’s step wherever they choose to spend their winter months.
Stanley who? If you’re buying a gift for a wellness enthusiast who’s looking to drink more water, ignore viral trends and get them an Owala FreeSip. Owala’s patented spout allows drinkers to seamlessly switch between slurping upright through a built-in straw and tilting back to swig from a spout.
The double-walled stainless steel insulation keeps drinks ice cold for up to 24 hours, while the wide mouth and detachable straw make the whole system easy to clean. Plus, it comes in a range of sizes and fun color combos that are sure to please everyone on your gift list.
Rachel Feltman
Rachel is a freelance writer, editor and content strategist and host of the hit podcast The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. Her first book, "Been There, Done That: A Rousing History of Sex" came out in May 2022. She loves reading about weird history, sharing weird science facts and writing weird ghost stories.