Waxing Cynical
🎙️ Waxing Cynical is here – yes, it's another podcast nobody asked for, brought to you by two brown girls who were never given the mic (so we took it). As self-appointed outsiders and full-time sceptics, we're not here to solve anything – just to dig in, analyse, and side-eye the world of culture and business.
I'm an existentialist; Jamila Ali is a nihilist. Together, we’re here to see if there’s any meaning, substance, or even hope in consumer culture, or if it’s all just noise with a nice aesthetic. From fashion to digital, beauty to retail, we’ll be wading through it all and asking how brands might find more depth (without us holding our breath). Tune in if you’re into grumpy insights, big questions, and a little eye-roll or two.
Waxing Cynical
Ep 4 - Body Politics: Wellness, Power & Who Gets Left Behind - TIME CAPSULE EDITION
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In these Time Capsule editions, we make our predictions about the year ahead and seal the conversation away. The episode is time-stamped, archived, and only released the following year. When it drops, we revisit the thinking: what we got right, what we got wrong, and what changed along the way.
Think of it as our punk response to the endless churn of industry hot takes. Instead of rushing to feed the algorithm, we slow things down and put real skin in the game.
No edits. No hindsight. Just the thinking as it was at the time.
Because strategy shouldn’t just react to the moment, it should be willing to stand behind a point of view.
Wellness, Power & the Body: Who Gets to Be Well?
Wellness culture has become increasingly political. In this conversation, recorded in early 2025 and released in 2026, we map a cultural moment that has since become our lived reality: GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic are democratizing skinniness, long the most covetable beauty standard for women, and yet the playing field is not leveling. The standards are simply shifting, and the inequalities are deepening.
We unpack how wellness culture is colliding with anti-institutional movements, post-COVID distrust, and a widening gap in who actually has access to health and beauty. What does it mean to "be well" and "beautiful" in a moment defined by contradiction: authenticity on one hand, extreme body transformation on the other?
A prescient conversation for anyone paying attention to where culture, commerce, and the body meet.
