When Megan Debin purchased her Long Beach, Calif., house in 2020, she found her backyard dreary with its cinder-block walls. Dr. Debin, an art history professor and content creator, was smitten with a light blue crab motif she had come across on Instagram. She asked its artist, Tracy Allen, a muralist in Long Beach, to paint the crab on one of her yard’s walls.

One mural turned into five — all different designs, predominantly blue — and now Dr. Debin, 45, sees her yard differently. “It’s so bright and playful, and it lifts your mood,” she said, adding that the murals inspired her to create an outdoor space where she could entertain among the yard’s orange trees.

Home murals were once relegated to children’s bedrooms, where they often tied into a theme. Today, they’ve grown up and taken over walls, indoors and out.

Technically speaking, a mural is a large work of art executed right on a wall. And while modern murals are typically associated with streetscapes and Insta-worthy backdrops, they’re one of the most primitive forms of artistic storytelling. In Dordogne, France, for example, the Lascaux cave paintings of about 15,000 to 17,000 years ago depicted horses, bison and other animals. And in Patagonia, Argentina, the “Cueva de las Manos” (“Cave of Hands”) is a composite of stenciled human hands that dates back at least 9,000 years.

“I think as humans we have this built-in tendency to share things with other people and do that in a visual way,” said Hailey Widrig, an art historian and founder of Art Partners Advisory in Paris, which advises collectors and appraises art works. “Murals really evolved out of that.”

The sprawling wall paintings have ebbed and flowed out of popularity through the centuries, from religious works in the Renaissance (like the “Last Supper”) to political statements by Diego Rivera in the 1930s and Banksy’s start in the 1990s. In the 2010s, destinations like Richmond, Va., which has hosted the RVA Street Art Festival since 2012, and Wynwood Walls in Miami began welcoming murals to add vibrancy and become attractions.

The rise of murals on social media has inspired homeowners to bring them indoors. “Platforms like Instagram have reframed murals as contemporary visual statements by transforming them from niche to aspirational through sheer exposure,” said Elena DeStefano, an interior designer in Philadelphia. “In response, designers began integrating them as immersive, site-specific works that introduce a unique narrative and spatial complexity into the home.”

That individualized touch is what makes Ms. DeStefano so inclined to incorporate murals in homes. “I think they work in literally any room with walls,” she said. “They are a true representation of the person that lives in that home because there’s no mural that is ever going to be the same.”

Ms. DeStefano is also a proponent of digital mural wall coverings by companies like Phillip Jeffries. She recently worked with a couple who wanted birds in their mural, and the company blended their designs and tweaked the scale of the birds to make a customized mural.

There are considerations to take into account before painting a mural. Diana Hathaway, an interior designer in the San Francisco Bay Area, suggested pulling in colors from the surrounding design to make the space cohesive. “It doesn’t have to be too literal, but it should echo something you already have going on,” Ms. Hathaway said.

Many see hand-painted murals as an alternative to wallpaper, which can be fussy to install — and not as unique. Some muralists paint designs reminiscent of wallpaper, like Kate White who lives in Garrison, N.Y. She specializes in retro hues and geometric patterns, such as a terrazzo-inspired bathroom mural or pink and yellow blocks in an entry hallway.

Even an often-overlooked area, like a stairwell, is not immune to a muralist’s palette. Kreh Mellick, an artist in Asheville, N.C., recently painted one in a family member’s home in Virginia. Ms. Mellick took the stairwell from plain to whimsical, adorned with stars and a dress-clad sun ascending over flowers and a blueberry patch.

In some cases, homeowners empower muralists to think beyond just painting the walls. Christina Kwan, a muralist in Atlanta, installed an oceanic mural-painting hybrid in a client’s dining room. “When I work on canvases, they’re so contained,” she said. “Then when I work on murals, they’re so expansive, but I want them to have the intimacy that a canvas does.” Additionally, if the homeowners ever move, they can bring the canvas with them, too.

Even in the modern era, murals tell stories. Rachel Kerns, a muralist in Sacramento with a flair for boho-chic florals, painted a dining room ceiling in Pasadena, Calif., last year. Among leaves and golden flowers set against a red backdrop, Ms. Kerns painted silhouettes of the homeowner’s children on the edge of the mural.

“We incorporated the silhouettes in a way that was kind of abstract and not too on the nose or cheesy,” Ms. Kerns said. “I just thought it was so special that it was above the table that they’re going to dine at for years.”

When I met the writer Amy Larocca at a cafe in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn on a recent afternoon, I could not help but notice: She had the glow. Or seemed to.

The glow, as Ms. Larocca explains in her new book, “How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time,” is what happens when you purify yourself “from the inside out.” When you never miss a day of your skin care routine, regularly drain your lymphatic fluids and take your collagen supplements. But to truly glow, you must also practice mindfulness, self-care and, ideally, transcendental meditation, avoid processed junk and sleep at least eight hours every night.

Such are the exacting standards of a contemporary wellness culture that has swelled to encompass nearly every facet of life. Not just the serums we slather on our faces or the Pilates classes we scurry off to but the food we eat (always whole foods), the bowel movements we pass (must be “firm and beautifully formed”) and the very thoughts we let enter our minds (intentional ones only).

It sounds like a lot of work. Or one might say it sounds like a lot of work — if it were not so incumbent on a well woman to be perpetually at ease.

After talking to Ms. Larocca, 49, for an hour, I learned she did not do everything a well woman should. She tries to sleep a lot. She exercises regularly. And yes, she wears an Oura ring, the latest in wearable tech for tracking one’s blood oxygen rate, body temperature and other biometrics.

But she does not observe 12-step routines of any kind. She is aware of the fact that dry-brushing may be a great way to exfoliate but that it probably does not drain your lymphatic fluid.

Sometimes, she participates in what she calls “recreational wellness,” something she knows is not likely to achieve what it promises but that nonetheless brings her some form of pleasure. Ms. Larocca, who spent 20 years at New York magazine in various roles including fashion director, is no stranger to the intensely human draw to believe that some of these practices will give her a control over her life and her body that she knows is fundamentally unattainable — which may be the emotional core of our wellness obsession.

This conversation, which took place over a matcha latte and an iced green tea, has been edited for length and clarity.

Going into your book, I had a much more narrow view of what wellness was. But I was compelled by your more capacious understanding of this world.

Wellness is really silly exercise classes. It’s also underserved communities talking about how no one takes their health seriously. We can talk about the way the beauty industry uses wellness as a “get-out-of-jail-free” card when it wants to pretend it’s feminist. We can talk about weird colonic therapists. We can talk about wellness as a socially acceptable term for eating disorders. There are 90 million ways to have a wellness conversation. In the end, I tried to say, wellness is all of this and we just live in this messed-up soup.

At this point, it seems hard to draw any firm boundaries around wellness.

Sometimes you see this when you go to these new medical practices. You’re like, “Am I at a spa? A gym? A boutique hotel? At the doctor? In a Kate Hudson movie?”

You started this book before Covid. How was your idea of wellness shaped by the pandemic?

It quickly became clear who was getting sick and who was dying from Covid. So the concept that was driving the project — coming at it from the perspective of someone who has written about fashion and style all these years — was that wellness had become this thing where we’re being sold our own bodies with the same marketing techniques that people use to sell handbags or shoes or lipstick. It’s incredibly dangerous to live in a society that treats health like a luxury product.

I liked that you pointed out some of the inconsistencies contained within wellness culture. At one point, you mention the concept of a single well-intentioned cigarette — a little indulgence.

It’s because all of these things reside within privilege. There’s a term, the narcissism of small differences. The things that make someone unwell are so much bigger than whatever little wellness protocol. They’re these larger socioeconomic factors.

Something I was thinking about as I read was the gendered aspect of wellness, and wellness as a kind of bonding exercise among women — sharing your insecurities, how you want to self-improve, these personal routines.

I think it can be. Going to an exercise class with friends or to a spa — it’s definitely a bonding ritual for a lot of people. There are wellness social clubs, like Remedy Place. It can also be a form of entertainment or recreation. It’s just a question of understanding its position and your expectations. It’s important to say here: It’s not like I hate wellness. I also participate in a lot of it. I think wellness is too entrenched in our lives to be “pro” or “anti.”

I love the term “recreational wellness.” It seems to relate to an experience I often have, which is knowing something is not going to work but doing it anyway.

It’s a diversion. I exercise a lot — part of it is for recreation, part of it is for actual health. I used to do my red light stuff and drink my collagen. Now I’ve sort of whittled it down. Every once in a while, a friend of mine will call me and be like, “My life has been changed by bovine colostrum!” And I’m like, “I need bovine colostrum!”

Recently, I was in a pharmacy filled with beautiful skin care products in an upscale part of Los Angeles. I knew I did not need anything, but I wanted it. And an elegant woman was floating around the store offering to help customers find what suited them.

It can really make you feel cared for and cosseted. It can feel really nice!

I thought about how it would feel to have all of these things in my medicine cabinet. I would feel like one of the fancy women walking around this neighborhood. Which goes back to the luxury aspect.

It’s the same feeling of, “if I purchase this bag. …”

Why is the pull so strong? We often know consciously that these products are not going to do what they say they will.

Wouldn’t it be so great if they did, though? And in the absence of credible information from actual experts, there’s this incredible opportunity. We want it to be true, and there’s a loss of faith in the systems that are supposed to be protecting us and informing us. And it’s on the left and the right. A lot of the Moon Juice products and the Infowars supplements have some of the same types of ingredients. The message on both sides is, “Prepare yourself for the collapse of the world! Wellness will save us from these terrible inevitabilities!”

Something about knowing that there is so much snake oil and bad information out there can also amplify the feeling that somewhere, hidden among these thousands of products, are maybe the two or three that “actually work.”

Totally! I’m like, “Sometime, one of these Bobbi Brown emails is going to have that tip!” And what if that was the time I didn’t click?