Scentbird co-founder and CEO Mariya Nurislamova is a familiar presence on the entrepreneurial circuit: She regularly takes to the stage at business conferences and shares her insights on podcasts, where she details how she approaches fundraising, marketing, branding and product for her startup, which sells subscriptions to receive perfume samples from brands like Burberry and DS&Durga.
At the same time, Nurislamova has developed a following as a guru, speaking to some 300,000 followers across YouTube, Spotify, TikTok and Instagram about extraterrestrial life, how we live in a “matrix,” and wellness techniques like meditation, chakras and crystals. On these channels, she describes herself as a “spiritual teacher, intuitive, channeler and author.”
The founders’ two worlds rarely intersected until recently, but Nurislamova’s more extreme spiritual musings have begun to circulate on social media — a YouTube video dissecting her thoughts has garnered more than 670,000 views — and it’s the first time many of ScentBird’s customers and brand ambassadors have seen a video of Nurislamova’s beliefs.
A lot of people don’t like what they see.
“I have no intention of working with them in the future if they ever propose anything to me,” wrote YouTuber Zachary Michael, an influencer who has worked with Scentbird. He shared the comments under a video about Nurislamova posted last week by Keyes World, a channel focused on debunking the claims of spiritual gurus.
This video and others like it were compiled after reviewing 603 TikTok posts and YouTube videos shared by Nurislamova since May 2020. In them, Nurislamova claims that it is possible to “cure” cancer and AIDS in seven days, that miscarriage is a “choice” and not an “accident,” and that abortion negatively impacts karma. These videos are posted alongside ideas such as “eating honey makes you a better person,” “having crooked teeth is not a ‘coincidence,'” “tomatoes and potatoes cause illness,” and “coffee is bad for your aura.”
Nurislamova’s views on “The Matrix” have garnered the most attention. She frequently espouses the idea that humans live in a “virtual reality type system” like a video game, as she calls it in her videos. While discussing the concept with her husband, ScentBird co-founder and chief product officer Sergey Gusev, in a May 2022 video, she described Hitler as “one of the greatest, greatest sources of knowledge about 3D Earth warfare.”
“Do you know how many millions of souls have benefited from learning from the experiences he created? Does that make him evil? No. I don’t think so,” she said.
When asked Beauty Business Regarding the comments, Nurislamova said: “The video has been taken out of context, so it only captures a small part of what was actually said, and if you take it out of context the message changes completely,” adding: “I see everything as one, so of course murder is not acceptable. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I would never support that. Never in a billion years.”
Complaints about Nurislamova’s views have so far been limited to social media comment sections and beauty and fragrance threads on Reddit. But her videos stand in contrast to 10-year-old Scentbird, which calls itself the “Netflix of perfume” and allows customers to pay a monthly fee to receive samples in the mail. Unlike many wellness brands you’ll find on Goop or Erewhon, the closest Scentbird comes to a mystical, new-age marketing language is a “scent-reading” recommendation tool on the site.
The company was born during the fashion and beauty subscription boom of the mid-2010s, went on to tech incubator Y Combinator and raised $25 million from venture capital firms including Goodwater Capital, Rainfall Ventures, FoundersClub and Soma Capital.
Nurislamova said: Beauty Business ScentBird has experienced “45 to 50 percent year-over-year growth over the past two years” and has been profitable since 2019. He said its annual revenue is “well over $100 million” with more than 700,000 subscribers.
She said she does not bring her beliefs to the workplace and uses only her first name in most of her spiritual content to “protect Scentbird.” She said, “I would be surprised if investors know my personality,” and that investors “know my personality.” Beauty Business The company did not respond to a request for comment. Although Gusev appears frequently in her spiritual videos, in which she says he hypnotized her to get her into a “deep theta state,” she said co-founder and CTO Andrey Rebrov “didn’t know my account existed until two days ago.” Rebrov had not responded as of press time. The fourth co-founder, Rachel Ten Brink, left the company in 2019 and did not respond to a request for comment.
“My name wasn’t really that well known,” Nurislamova said.
Origin story
Nurislamova said on her YouTube channel that she experienced a spiritual “awakening” in 2018. She began watching videos about astral projection, and eventually had dreams in which spirits spoke to her.
She began posting to her new account early in the pandemic, when conspiracy theories, New Age spirituality, and pseudoscientific health content were becoming popular online. One of her earliest podcasts, recorded with Gusev in 2020, criticized COVID-19 countermeasures such as wearing masks and staying at home, saying that a “victim mentality” and “underlying energy” could make people more susceptible to COVID-19 infection or make them more severely ill.
Nurislamova said: Beauty Business “I’m not a conspiracy theorist,” she said. But the themes of the hundreds of videos she has posted vary widely and often align with beliefs held by right-wing conspiracy theorists, including recent speculations about the “starseed” theory, which posits the existence of human-alien hybrids, a belief system held by the “QAnon shaman” who made a notorious, unusual appearance at the January 6 Capitol storming. She has described a belief in “spiritual visitors from all kinds of planets, constellations, star systems, and different galaxies.”
Nurislamova has built a business, including books and events, around her beliefs. Last month she hosted a spiritual retreat for 28 people at Glastonbury, promising to “tap into the mystical energy associated with Glastonbury” for $1,111. She charges $3,000 for private online spirit channeling sessions and $125,000 for a “one-on-one in-person transformational retreat.”
But to other audience members, many of her comments are strange and disturbing.
In a June 6 video that has been viewed more than 100,000 times, YouTuber Noor Jasmine, who has previously worked on sponsored content for Scentbird, criticized Nurislamova’s claims about hair color: “People with dark hair have a harder time making intuitive judgments. They don’t have as good a sense of discrimination. Dancing and moving your body is very natural, sports and all that is very natural.”
“If you’ve watched my channel, you know that Scent Bird sponsors a lot of my videos,” Jasmine said in the 38-minute video. When a commenter on a recent sponsored post informed her about Nurislamova’s content, “I was like, ‘Damn,’ Really? That’s the worst. … I really love Scent Bird,” she said.
While Nurislamova said she has done her best to keep the two worlds separate, she has no plans to delete anything now that her content is directly tied to the brand.
“Actually, I think it’s a good thing that this whole convergence is happening,” she said. “I think it was just a matter of time. … It’s nice to see that I’m both.”
