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It’s an early summer evening in Mayfair, and I’m feeling out of place. I’m the only woman at the private members’ club in flat shoes, and seemingly the only one without bouncy, blow-dried hair. When I enter the event space, I am greeted with a room full of the same nose on different faces and the same Chanel pumps on different feet.
I’m here for the launch of Dripdash, which advertises itself on its website as “a premium, on-demand wellness service.” It is, in fact, a van parked outside. Its interior is decked out like a private jet, with cream leather seats that recline under tiny, star-like spotlights. To one side, a mini fridge is stocked with rows of medical-looking bottles that contain a liquid form of vitamin B12, which a nurse is currently injecting into the slim, toned arms of several women.
One woman, dressed in expensive-looking, well-cut clothes in pastel colours, tells me that she works in her family's oil and gas business, and is here before she enrolls at a luxury fertility clinic in LA. Another, who looks uncannily like Lana del Rey, is a regular at the members' club — she knows the event promoter and came because she was excited by the idea of getting her vitamins via a shot from another nurse stationed on the club’s dancefloor.
They are typical of a clientele being courted by a growing list of private health clinics and wellness services popping up in London that offer customers the elusive concept of “longevity” — provided they can afford it. While it may be a cliché that the rich want to buy the one thing they can’t — immortality — these businesses offer those with a few spare thousand the chance to try, at least.
“It’s ‘I just had NAD this morning,’ rather than ‘I just got off a PJ’”
A few weeks after the launch, I sit down with Jessyca Swann, the founder of Dripdash. “Wellness is now cool,” she says. “It’s showing off in a different way. It’s ‘I just had NAD this morning,’ rather than ‘I just got off a PJ.’” (NAD is the miracle product du jour in the longevity world — more on that later — and a PJ is a private jet, to translate for those of us who only travel Ryanair and will probably die at a measly 85.)
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