Vietnam's Gen Z Is Paying to Feel Better: Inside the Healing Economy of Scented Candles, Crystals and Cafes
In Ho Chi Minh City, more young people are skipping the club on weekends to pour their own scented candle or zone out for an afternoon at a healing cafe. Healing is becoming something Vietnam's Gen Z will happily pay for.
[Vietnam's Gen Z Is Paying to Feel Better: Inside the Healing Economy of Scented Candles, Crystals and Cafes]
On weekends in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), a growing number of young people are not heading to the club. They are tucked into a sunlit little shop, pouring hot wax into a glass jar to blend a scented candle of their own. Or they order a coffee and spend an afternoon doing nothing at all in a softly lit "healing cafe," soft music playing.
These low-productivity activities are turning into real spending. Scented candles, diffuser oils, crystals, healing cafes — the things Vietnamese lump together as "chữa lành" (healing) — have gone from a niche personal interest to a new consumer market.
What are young people actually buying? Not the function of the product, but the feeling it delivers: relaxation, calm, a way to reset, or a small sense that life is still in their own hands in a world that moves too fast and never stops talking.
01｜Healing Is Becoming a Business
This is not a Vietnamese phenomenon. It is a global wave that has reached Vietnam.
McKinsey's "Future of Wellness 2025" report puts the global wellness market at roughly US$2 trillion. After surveying 9,000 people across the US, China, the UK and Germany, the firm found that younger consumers no longer treat self-care as an occasional indulgence — it is a daily practice. In the US alone, Gen Z and millennials make up about 36% of the adult population but drive more than 41% of wellness spending. The two numbers measure different things: the US$2 trillion is the global market, while the 41% applies only to the US. Vietnam is a small slice of this global wave.
The savviest players in this market are the high-end fragrance brands. France's Diptyque barely mentions traditional selling points like long-lasting scent or premium ingredients. Instead it packages its candles as a Parisian ritual of slow living. Byredo, shaped by founder Ben Gorham, tells stories through cinematic personal memory. Put a candle like that on your desk and it stops being a candle — it becomes a marker of taste and emotional depth.
02｜Social Media and Celebrities Turned Healing Into a Lifestyle
What pushed all this into the mainstream was social media and famous faces.
On TikTok, hashtags like #healingjourney, #selfcare and #cleangirl have racked up billions of views, one clip after another about recharging after burnout or manifesting good things. On Pinterest, searches for fragrance layering, healing aesthetics and personalized spaces keep climbing.
Celebrities play the role of making it normal. Singer Adele has said she brings crystals backstage before every big show to calm her nerves and balance her mood, as she told Vanity Fair. Supermodel Bella Hadid often shares essential oils and meditation tools online. The wave reached Vietnam too: singer Tóc Tiên and fashion blogger Châu Bùi post their own home rituals, shelves lined with quartz, candles lit, sage or palo santo burning to unwind.
As these influential people keep putting crystals, scents and self-care rituals in front of everyone, things once dismissed as superstition or mysticism shed the stigma and become a natural part of young people's modern lives.
03｜What Healing Looks Like in Vietnam
Back in Vietnam, the wave is concentrated in the two big cities, Hanoi and HCMC.
Scented candle workshops like Dipsoul Candle & Workshop and NOTE - The Scent Lab show up more and more on social media, and weekend slots are often fully booked. On the cafe side, established spots like L'usine and Giao are pivoting toward the "healing cafe" model, treating a customer's emotional ease as seriously as the quality of the food. The spaces deliberately blend natural light, soft music and a minimalist, slightly retro look. Some shops also sell diffusers, candles and assorted healing trinkets so you can pack that calm feeling and take it home.
The barrier to entry is low. In HCMC, a weekend healing workshop can start from a few tens of thousands of VND, with most landing between 200,000 and 700,000 VND — a bit more than a movie ticket, less than a nice dinner, and you get a photo op and a finished product to take away. For young people short on cash but wanting to treat themselves, it is an affordable little pick-me-up.
04｜Why Now? A Generation Under Pressure
Healing became a business because the need is real.
A late-2024 wellness survey of Vietnam by research firm Cimigo offers a few telling numbers: Vietnamese consumers feel stressed about 1.98 times a week on average, more than half (53%) sleep less than the recommended 7 to 8 hours, and they spend around 1.38 million VND a month on health-related products. The interesting part: 68% of the same respondents still rate their mental health as good. In other words, most young Vietnamese do not think they are sick. They are simply finding ways to catch their breath during stressful days.
So against a backdrop of economic pressure and information overload, with the mind freezing up now and then, things once filed under "non-essential" have become one of the fastest-growing parts of the experience economy.
05｜Healing Is This Generation's Breathing Room
In the end, when young Vietnamese pay for healing, they are not really buying a candle or a coffee. They are buying time — a stretch of it where they can switch off the pressure and breathe.
Urban stress, social media hype and celebrity example have carried these once-niche things into the mainstream over the past few years. For young people this is a need they no longer feel they have to hide. Life is tiring, and spending a little to feel better is nothing to be embarrassed about.
And as more people pay to feel a bit better, the business is likely only going to grow. For brands chasing the youth market, the question worth watching is how to turn something as hard to name as "calm" or "feeling understood" into a coffee, a candle, an afternoon you can hold in your hands.
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