When the plane lurched violently in the middle of a cross-country flight, I clutched the armrest with one hand. With the other, I reached for my ear. Days earlier, wielding an oversized pair of tweezers, an acupuncturist at New York City’s WTHN clinic had affixed a constellation of tiny crystals to my outer ear. In a quiet, dimly lit room I felt a pleasing sensation when the crystals—each about the size of a large stud—were pressed against my skin. The seeds, as the crystals are called, are intended to stimulate the brain to send various signals to the body when positioned: There’s a point near the inner flap to aid with digestion and another near the top for stress. Once secured, they evoke both the edge of Maria Tash piercings and ’90s star-shaped stick-on earrings. Midair, in heavy turbulence, however, pressing them serves a single purpose: calming me over the Rocky Mountains.
I’m a lifelong sticker enthusiast, from validating gold stars to satisfying scratch-and-sniffs. My children mock me, but Hello Kitty stickers still adorn my laptop and birthday cards, as evocative to me as a tube of Bonne Bell Lip Smackers. (When I saw that Olivia Rodrigo had decorated her face with clusters of stickers for the cover of her debut album, Sour, I felt a kind of spiritual affinity.) But lately, stickermania has extended well beyond those of us who harbor a nostalgia for decor that once covered the insides of our lockers or the bottoms of our skateboards.
The wellness-oriented stickers you’re now likely to encounter are of two general varieties. There are the kinds designed to stimulate pressure points (those handy aids for my cross-country trip). Ear seeding (which gets its name from the Vaccaria seeds used by practitioners in traditional Chinese medicine) is “like taking your acupuncture on the go,” says Gudrun Snyder, founder of Moon Rabbit Acupuncture in Chicago. Laura Sniper, a doctor of acupuncture at WTHN, often sends clients home with a set to prolong the effects: “They’re working in the background,” she says, “while you’re living your life.”
And then there are transdermal patches that purport to deliver nutrients or other forms of sustenance (say, aromatherapy) by being affixed to the skin. Previously used to provide medicine or help people kick nicotine addiction, the new generation of patches addresses concerns ranging from stress, pain, and menstrual bloating to dry skin and jet lag. Ideally, permeable patch ingredients “have the ability to pass through the epidermis, be absorbed by the blood vessels, and enter the circulation,” says Hadley King, MD, a dermatologist in New York City. (That’s an appealing prospect given that oral supplements can sometimes cause gastrointestinal side effects.)
Both varieties are poised for an expansion. WTHN recently received $5 million in funding, and Meghan Markle went viral last year for wearing a blue, disc-shaped anti-stress wrist patch from the company NuCalm, which claims to activate an acupressure point (on the left wrist) that brings about relaxation. (The company reported a “major spike” in sales in the aftermath.) In January, London-based acupuncturist Ross J. Barr, who has treated Markle and Prince Harry, released his Patch Pack for the first time in the US through Violet Grey ($60 for 25). The aromatherapy adhesives—individual patches are designated for “calm” or “sleep”—quickly sold out. When Claridge’s put his patches in its minibars, Barr says, they were outsold only by bottled water.
Though inherently temporary, stick-on treatments could shift the beauty and wellness world more permanently. Cleo Davis-Urman founded her company, Barrière, in 2020 to produce stylish medical-grade face masks, but expanded to vitamins. (The company’s motto: “Wear your vitamins. Feel better.”) In 2022, she was diagnosed as dangerously deficient in iron and B**12**. With Davis-Urman’s body failing to absorb capsule vitamins and insurance limiting coverage on injections and infusions, her doctor prescribed a patch, which she quickly discovered was too bulky to fit under clothes and only available in an unappealing shade of medical beige—“something that you would associate with being sick,” she says.
Her solution: an array of temporary-tattoo-like decals said to contain particle-size vitamins and supplements, designed to pass through the skin and tissue and into the bloodstream. Davis-Urman now gets her daily dose of iron and B 12 from bird or moon stickers—applied to any swath of clean, dry skin. Other stickers are geared toward skin health with ingredients like biotin and milk thistle, while a sheet of “travel well” seashells purports to ease anxiety and inflammation with herbal ashwagandha—“nature’s Xanax,” Davis-Urman calls it. I wear one of the travel well patches on my wrist before boarding my turbulent flight, and despite the traffic, work jitters, and exhaustion, I just might feel uncharacteristically easygoing.
Patch wellness is an emerging frontier, and, as such, data supporting its claims is limited. “They’re trendy, but more research is needed before we can assume that they’re effective,” says Jennifer Wider, MD. (She cites a small-scale 2019 study of bariatric surgery patients that found that those who wore multivitamin patches were more likely to be vitamin deficient than patients who took oral vitamins.) Wider is skeptical of the NuCalm disc’s product description—“promising way too much,” she says. And as King pointed out, the list of drugs that we know can be transmitted transdermally is “very limited.” Our skin is a strong barrier; only very small molecules, like nicotine, have been proven to be successfully absorbed via patch.
Barrière notes that its endorsement of herbal supplements like echinacea or ashwagandha has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates vitamins and supplements according to a different set of rules than those it applies to food—in many cases only evaluating products that have already hit the marketplace. (Barrière’s patches are produced in a UK facility registered with the British government’s main medical regulatory agency.) And the website for Barr’s patches includes disclaimers that they are “not a substitute for medicines or medical devices.” But, he tells skeptics, “things like aromatherapy have been around for thousands of years; nothing hangs around that long that doesn’t work.” For Snyder, it doesn’t matter if ear seeding or a placebo effect is responsible for a greater state of calm: “It means it’s doing something for you.”