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.
(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”.
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 is: ‘Wear your vitamins. Feel better.’) In 2022, she was diagnosed as dangerously deficient in iron and B12. With Davis-Urman’s body failing to absorb capsule vitamins and insurance limiting coverage on injections and infusions, her doctor prescribed vitamin patches, which she quickly discovered was too bulky to fit under clothes and only available in an unappealing shade of medical beige. “It looked like something 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 B12 from bird or moon stickers, applied to any patch 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 or “nature’s Xanax”, as 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 sceptical 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 (FDA), 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 sceptics, “things like aromatherapy have been around for thousands of years; nothing hangs around that long if it 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.” There is a secondary effect to wearing our treatments on our skin: calling it self-care as self-expression and offering an opportunity to talk about anxiety, pain or hormone concerns. “It’s a big cultural shift to destigmatise the fact that we all struggle with something,” says WTHN’s Sniper. Over dinner in LA, I show off my ear seeds to my two friends and the conversation drifts into stress and therapy and the various challenges we’re experiencing. We hadn’t seen one another in years, but the emotional distance between us quickly narrows, a fresh candour facilitated by my openly worn admission, and that’s something I hope sticks.
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