Queen Latifah has a new gig. The legendary entertainer has served many roles, from a groundbreaking rapper and Oscar-nominated actress to talk show host. Now, she’s added another notch to her belt: Weight Watchers spokesperson.
In September, Latifah was announced as the face of the 62-year-old weight-loss company’s new menopause campaign. Following its move into doctor-prescribed treatments like GLP-1s with the launch of WW Clinic in 2023, Weight Watchers will now offer members access to menopause-related treatments like hormone replacement therapy.
“Queen had her own story about having to talk to her OB-GYN about this life stage,” said Phillip Picardi, who joined Weight Watchers as chief brand officer in 2024. “So this idea that Weight Watchers, which is this very mass brand that millions of women all over the world have used, can be a front door now to access menopause-trained medical experts, … It felt like a really good synergy of democratizing this care.”
Latifah is no stranger to acting as a brand spokesperson. In 2001, she began a long-running contract with CoverGirl, and in 2006, she launched her in-house makeup line, the CoverGirl Queen Collection, well before celebrity-backed brands and shade inclusivity were de rigeur in the beauty industry. In 2021, she partnered on a campaign with Novo Nordisk as the pharmaceutical company prepared to launch its weight-loss medication Wegovy.
In 2025, however, Latifah is far from the only celebrity to move her star power from beauty to health and wellness products, either as a public-facing ambassador or behind-the-scenes investor.
A growing spate of celebrity and health-care partnerships speaks not only to booming opportunities in wellness as the cosmetics and skin-care sectors face slumping sales, but also to blurring lines between beauty, wellness and healthcare as discrete categories.
In August, Serena Williams was announced as the new ambassador for telehealth company Ro, sharing her experience accessing a GLP-1 through the platform. Actress Vanessa Hudgens was named an investor in diagnostic testing startup Superpower when it launched its membership program in August. On Monday, Naomi Watts’s Stripes Beauty announced a partnership with women’s telehealth company Wisp, where the latter will sell Stripes’s menopause-targeted products like supplements and moisturizers.
Many of those companies hope that — unlike a doctor — a familiar face like a celebrity can offer an entry point to oft-stigmatized categories like weight loss or menopause.
“Celebrities have an additional impact and influence to talk about health care. Because when they open up, people look up to those people,” said Saman Rahmanian, co-founder and chief product officer of Ro. “It gives them the permission to take that step to explore it and see if treatment is right for them.”
Rahmanian declined to share specific statistics but said that Ro has already seen an increase in sign-ups since Williams joined the brand, even while many fans expressed disappointment at seeing the athlete endorse a weight-loss drug.
Williams has put many investments toward beauty and wellness since her retirement from professional tennis in 2022. She launched the tennis-inspired makeup brand Wyn Beauty in 2024. In July, shortly before the reveal of her Ro campaign, supplement company Ritual announced her as its first women’s health advisor. Williams is also an investor in Teal Health, the at-home cervical cancer testing company that received FDA approval in May. Her husband, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, is a board member and early investor in Ro.
But Wyn has reportedly seen the exit of many of its top executives as it faces declining sales at Ulta Beauty. And the beauty boom that triggered the launch of countless celebrity beauty brands like Wyn seems to be coming to a slowdown. Coty, parent company to CoverGirl and Kylie Cosmetics, reported an 8% drop in net revenue for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2025, citing struggling sales in color cosmetics. The Estée Lauder Companies reported an 8% drop in net sales for the fiscal year 2025, with its skin-care and makeup sectors falling 12% and 6%, respectively.
According to McKinsey & Company’s 2025 Future of Wellness survey, the $500 billion U.S. wellness market is expected to grow 4-5% annually. Smart ring innovator Oura Health Oy is on track to reach a nearly $11 billion valuation and hit $1 billion in sales in 2025, doubling its $500 million revenue in 2024. Not all wellness companies have seen such success, however; in May, prior to Latifah’s endorsement, Weight Watchers filed for bankruptcy.
While the wellness category has global reach, many of the factors that lead consumers to seek health and wellness tools from celebrity-endorsed platforms are distinctly American.
“There’s a lot of money to be made in finding ways around the barriers created by our system to accessing good medical care,” said Elisabeth Rosenthal, MD, senior contributing editor of health news analysis at KFF Health News. “People have been kind of beaten around by our healthcare system and overcharged, and they’ve waited a long time for things and on endless phone trees. The whole system is not trusted, and so that leaves an opening for advertising of alternatives.”
As they seek to target patients directly, rising consumer-facing healthcare companies like Wisp, Ro, and His and Hers employ the kind of sleek branding and marketing that wouldn’t look out of place in a Glossier campaign.
“We are not just in a world where beauty and wellness are distinct,” said Picardi. “All of the categories are starting to blur, and they’re definitely starting to merge. The general trend in wellness is, ‘How do we make something that once felt very medicalized actually feel like a lifestyle?’”
For Stripes, whose menopause-targeted products are now available on women’s telehealth platform Wisp, those blurring categories give reason to believe that consumers might shop for wellness products like supplements in the same place they’re looking for prescription medication.
“We really believe in that kind of omnichannel access to menopause, which is not just limited to traditional retail environments,” said Cara Kamenev, president of Stripes Beauty. “We know that a lot of these purchases are happening online, and they can certainly happen through Stripes’s DTC site. But we also acknowledge that sometimes [the consumer] is seeking prescription care, and we’d like to be with her during that experience, as well.”
Kamenev said the partnership came about as Wisp shares similar values with Stripes founder Naomi Watts in opening access to women’s healthcare. Some wellness brands are working with celebrities to take those shared goals directly to Capitol Hill.
In September, women’s wellness brand Perelel hosted actors Mandy Moore and Lupita Nyong’o to meet with D.C. lawmakers to address funding for women’s health research. Moore is also an official partner to Perelel and has appeared in Instagram posts promoting the products.
But even with the cross-section between celebrity and health and wellness growing, Perelel’s co-founder Alex Taylor said she does not anticipate using those celebrity faces for larger roles.
“I want people to learn about Perelel ideally through their physician or through a friend who found it deeply supportive. Or by relating perhaps to a celebrity that found solace in taking our products,” said Taylor. “But I don’t imagine us doing more with celebrities.”
