If you spend any amount of time at all on YouTube you’re no doubt familiar with Scentbird, as they’ve been sponsoring basically everything for some time now.
Well, turns out everyone’s favorite subscription perfume company is something of a milkshake duck, or at least it’s CEO, Mariya Nurislamova is. Youtuber CC Suarez, best known for her regular takedowns of MLM influencers, has brought the receipts, so settle in for a truly weird ride.
Mariya Nurislamova has a classic American Dream story. A childhood of post Soviet deprivation, freeing herself with nothing but the bootstraps of hard work and ambition, emigration to America and the building of a perfume empire. Its a perfect fable of the land of opportunity. Suarez, with a little bit of research, starts to poke some holes in it.
Starting with other residents of the tiny Russian town where Nuramislova’s grew up, who all paint a very different picture of the place, Suarez goes on to catalogue all the oddities, contradictions, and potential fabrications in the CEO’s work history. By itself this wouldn’t be especially noteworthy, CEO’s and rich people lie all the time, propaganda builds a business and water is wet. Neither would the allegedly terrible customer service provided by Scentbird that Suarez tackles next. What takes this from typical corporate grime to deeply, truly weird is what happens next; Nurislamova’s 2018 spiritual awakening.
In a YouTube video uploaded by the CEO, and clipped by Suarez, she talks about hearing the the voice of God in a dream and then continuing to hear Them, with many voices in many guises, in her waking life going forwards. Nurislamova’s has made a number of other spiritual claims since then, many deeply disturbing. Some will be depressingly familiar to those who’ve encountered the more extreme side of the alternative medicine and wellness communities. The idea that cancer is a result of not finding your life’s purpose, and that miscarriage a choice your body makes for your benefit, are just variations on the victim blaming standard in circles that believe you can positivity and manifest your way out of terminal illness and poverty.
Some of Nurislamova’s other “insights” are less common, certainly more original. The idea that eating nightshades (tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant etc) “brings darkness into your aura” that will stay there for seven years is entirely new to me despite my occasional reporting on these communities and their impact. Likewise her claim that crooked teeth indicates kharmic tangles in your family line, things you will have to overcome on your ancestor’s behalf, is something I’ve never heard before and feels very much like the collision of New Age spirituality and eugenics; something that occurs all too often.
While some Nurislamova’s medico-spiritual beliefs seem absurd but harmless, others, like her ideas about cancer and childbirth (difficult labours are caused by the baby not tapping into their “masculine energy”), are potentially dangerous; not least because Nurislamova has set herself up as a spiritual leader, selling incredibly expensive “courses” to access her “wisdom” and “guidance.” As we’ve seen with the case of Jessie Lee Ward (also covered by Suarez), an infamous MLM guru who videoed her journey to “healing” from cancer via coffee enemas, smoothies, and rejecting conventional medicine, right up until her death, desperate people buy into these alternative healing methods and die as a result. Worse is when they inflict these kinds of techniques on their children on other dependents, something that happens all too often in the world of alternative health.
Not all of Nurislamova’s statements focus on disease and medicine. Instead they veer once again into what appears to be racism and eugenics with a spiritual, victim blaming twist. As Suarez aptly points out, some of Nurislamova’s ideas — such as people destined for a life of hard labour choosing to have brown eyes, as they give a person greater stamina and a higher pain tolerance — directly correspond with racist ideas about Black people that were used to justify slavery and it’s abuses, and still to this day prevent Black people from accessing appropriate medical treatment. This isn’t entirely surprising as her corresponding take on blue eyed people is that they are “closer to God” and connected to aliens — New Age beliefs about aliens often have a core of white supremacy to them, albeit presented more or less explicitly depending on the group and the audience.
Perhaps the most disturbing, of the clips collated by Suarez, however, is Nurislamova’s defence of Hitler, Starting strong with the statement that “evil is just a matter of perspective, what’s good for one person is evil for another person” Nurislamova went on to hold Hitler up as an example; saying that even though he “is the poster child for evil” he helped millions of souls by providing them with a learning opportunity. She then went on to use World of Warcraft as her next example, seeming to equate the millions tortured and murdered during the Holocaust with the “killing” of video game characters, laughing at the idea that its not evil because “its a computer game” and stating that it’s the “same logic.”
Suarez considers Nurislamova a scammer, though she also believes that Nurislamova is sincere about her beliefs; according to Suarez the scam part comes in via the high price of her courses, and their predatory targeting of vulnerable people. It’s impossible to say if she’s right or not, if Nuramislova actually genuinely believes the things she’s saying or if it’s all a grift for money and influence like so many other self proclaimed gurus. What is clear is that her public statements have seriously damaged the reputation of Scentbird as a company now they’ve been brought into the mainstream, and it remains to be seen what the impact will be longterm.
Published: Oct 4, 2024 05:38 pm