When we talk about health and wellness online, we often assume the conversation is universal. But for Black women, the digital wellness landscape has historically been a space built for someone else, reflecting other bodies, other experiences, other definitions of what it means to be well.

This International Women's Week, Black Women's Wellness is reflecting on something we hear again and again from our community: digital health spaces do not always feel like they were made with us in mind. And that gap, between what exists and what is truly needed, has real consequences for the health, trust and wellbeing of Black women across the UK and beyond.

The Problem with "One Size Fits All" Wellness

The wellness industry is a multi-billion pound global market. Yet its dominant digital presence, the websites, apps, influencers and health platforms that shape how people think about their bodies and mental health, has consistently centred a narrow image of health that excludes many Black women by default.

This is not a minor aesthetic issue. When the faces, stories and lived realities of Black women are absent from digital health spaces, it sends a quiet but powerful message: your health is not the priority here. Research consistently shows that representation in healthcare, including digital healthcare, directly impacts whether people trust, engage with and benefit from health services and information.

"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare." — Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde wrote those words decades ago and yet they remain radically relevant. For Black women, self-care has never simply been a luxury trend. It has always been a form of resistance, a deliberate, conscious act of survival in systems that were not designed to protect or prioritise Black women's bodies, minds, or lives.

What the Data Tells Us

The evidence is clear that Black women face compounding inequalities when it comes to health outcomes, health literacy and access to culturally relevant health information. In the UK, Black women are significantly more likely to experience poor mental health outcomes, to face discrimination within healthcare settings and to report that health services do not understand or reflect their cultural context.

4× More likely for Black women to die in childbirth in the UK compared to white women
1 in 5 Black adults in the UK report feeling that health services do not take their concerns seriously
67% Of people turn to online sources first when seeking health information

And yet, the digital spaces where the majority of people now first seek health guidance remain disproportionately white, western and culturally narrow. For Black women navigating conditions that are underdiagnosed, misdiagnosed, or poorly understood within mainstream medicine, from fibroids and lupus to anxiety, burnout and postnatal depression, the lack of representative, trustworthy, culturally resonant digital health content is not just frustrating. It is a health equity issue.

What Representation in Digital Wellness Actually Looks Like

When we talk about representation, we do not simply mean putting a Black woman's face on a website. True representation in digital wellness goes deeper. It means:

What Culturally Centred Digital Wellness Requires

  • Language that reflects lived experience, not sanitised, medicalised language that creates distance, but words and framings that feel familiar, safe and real.
  • Visibility across diversity, Black women are not a monolith. Representation must include women of different ages, sizes, skin tones, backgrounds, abilities and orientations.
  • Acknowledgement of structural context, wellness cannot be discussed in a vacuum. Poverty, racism, housing insecurity and systemic discrimination shape the health of Black women. Digital wellness spaces must hold that truth.
  • Community voice in content creation, platforms that are built with Black women, not about them. Content co-created by, informed by and accountable to the community it serves.
  • Accessibility across generations and abilities, digital health spaces must consider Black women who are not digitally native, who use assistive technologies, or who have limited data or device access.
  • Trust as a design principle, given the historical and ongoing experiences of medical racism, trust must be built into every aspect of how digital health platforms communicate, look and function.

Why This Moment Matters

We are living through a pivotal period in digital health. Artificial intelligence, personalised apps and online platforms are increasingly shaping how people understand, manage and talk about their health. If the communities who have historically been excluded from healthcare design are not at the centre of this digital transformation, we risk encoding the same inequalities into a new generation of tools.

For Black women, this is not a hypothetical future risk. It is a present reality. AI health tools trained on datasets that underrepresent Black patients. Mental health apps that do not account for cultural expressions of distress. Wellness influencers whose advice is delivered through a lens that does not account for the structural realities of Black women's lives. These are not abstract problems, they are the everyday experience of Black women trying to find themselves in digital health spaces.

"I am deliberate and afraid of nothing." — Audre Lorde

It is in that spirit, deliberate and unafraid, that Black Women's Wellness exists. Our platform was built on the belief that Black women deserve a digital health space that truly sees them. Not as an afterthought. Not as a box to be ticked. But as the whole, complex, extraordinary human beings they are.

Our Commitment: Building Together

At Black Women's Wellness, we believe that the communities most impacted by health inequalities should be the ones who shape the solutions. That is why, as we reimagine and rebuild our digital platform, we are putting our community at the very centre of that process.

This is not tokenistic consultation. We are inviting Black women, across generations, backgrounds and lived experiences, to actively evaluate, critique and co-design what a truly representative digital wellness space looks like in 2025 and beyond.

Our upcoming Community Evaluation Forum on 28th March is one expression of that commitment. Thirty Black women will come together to critically review our platform, its design, usability, cultural resonance and accessibility and to directly shape its next phase of development. Their voices will not be a footnote to the process. They will be the process.

What Participants Will Shape at the March 28th Forum

  • How the platform looks, feels and speaks and whether it truly reflects the diversity of Black women's lives
  • Whether the content builds trust and credibility, or creates distance
  • How accessible and navigable the platform is across different generations and levels of digital confidence
  • What tools, resources and conversations Black women actually need from a digital wellness platform
  • The priorities for the platform's next phase of development

An Invitation

This International Women's Week, we want to say something clearly to every Black woman who has ever searched for health information and not seen herself reflected back: you are not the problem to be solved. You are the wisdom this space was built to hold.

Whether you join us on March 28th, share your wellness truth using #WellBlackWomen, follow our journey online, or simply know that a space like this exists, you are part of this. The future of Black women's digital wellness is being written right now and it is being written by us.

Be Part of Shaping the Future

Join us on 28th March for our Community Evaluation Forum, or follow our journey online as we build something truly representative.

Register for March 28th Follow @blackwomenswellnessuk

Published by The Black Women's Wellness Team · March 2025
blackwomenswellness.com · @blackwomenswellnessuk