Troye Sivan is now a beauty ambassador.

The Australian singer-songwriter and actor is the first global makeup brand ambassador of Puig-owned Rabanne, previously known as Paco Rabanne.

A post shared on Rabanne’s Instagram today includes a video of Sivan talking about their previous fashion collaborations and his excitement for this “new chapter” together.

Sivan also has a line of fragrances of decorative objects, Tsu Lange Yor, that launched in August 2023.

Rabanne launched makeup in June 2023 into Sephora, Ulta Beauty and Selfridges with space-age themed packaging and the legendary makeup artist Diane Kendal as its creative director.

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Dua Lipa, Again? Why Beauty Lines Need to Find New Brand Ambassadors

A familiar cast of celebrities became beauty spokespeople this week, but how many brands are too many for a gorgeous woman to promote?

Today, the global workforce is taking mental health more seriously — a 2022 survey by market research and analytics company The Harris Poll found that 52 percent of employees consider mental health awareness in the workplace to be “very important” to them. However, while 81 percent of working adults agree that employers have an obligation to prioritise their employees’ mental health, as many as 77 percent report that the topic isn’t discussed enough.

The importance of mental health awareness and support in the workplace is only increasing, with the younger generations coming into the workplace especially concerned about wellbeing. Gen-Z — those born between 1995 and 2009 — is more likely to report mental health concerns than any other demographic, according to an American Psychological Association report. For employers, this issue is no longer simply a moral and ethical matter, but a crucial factor relating to employee retention and engagement.

However, when junior talent enters the workplace, understanding how to navigate workplace pressures — with many idiosyncratic to fashion and creative industries — and how to better protect themselves, can be a challenging hurdle to overcome.

To discuss how to protect mental health and wellbeing in the fashion workplace, BoF’s Sophie Soar moderated a panel talk at Graduate Fashion Week 2024, gathering advice and insights from: Calypso Barnum-Bobb, self-discovery coach and founder of People Like Us Retreats, who has worked with the likes of Adidas, Puma, Glastonbury Festival, London College of Fashion and more; Nicola Chen, head of creative at resale site Depop and co-chair of Depop’s Wellbeing ERG; Ella Morgan-Crosby, corporate HR director at Alexander McQueen; and Zoe Mallett, a trained psychologist, workplace happiness consultant and creator, who has worked with the likes of Nike, L’Oréal, Snapchat, Soho House and more.

Now, BoF shares insights from the panel discussion.

Understand workplace pressures idiosyncratic to the fashion industry

CBB: This industry is so competitive. The pace is so fast, the operating rhythm is much more intense than other places. The normalisation of how fast you have to move things, make decisions and how often you have to be available has a massive impact.

Meanwhile, the fashion industry is visual — you’re constantly looking at other people — what they’re wearing, what they’re doing, so the comparison element is real. It makes you question, “Am I enough?” And that question can be incredibly demoralising.

NC: The thought that — you’re only as good as your next idea — that is a huge amount of pressure to work under. You can start to doubt yourself when you have that pressure of performing and achieving. Creative people have unique challenges because there’s no stop and start — it’s continuous. But you have to find time to stop.

ZM: You don’t give yourself enough grace when you’re stepping in from university and into your first role. You [typically] have so much more support when you’re in a university or a school system — you’re all of a sudden catapulted into a different world. You feel like everyone knows more than you.

Try and give yourselves grace — you’re not supposed to know everything, you’re supposed to be quite tired from learning new ways of working.

Take the time to check in with yourself

CBB: We can think that it’s indulgent to give ourselves five minutes of time every single day, but actually, the repetition of dedicating that time to yourself is where you start to notice patterns and where you start to notice differences.

ZM: Everybody is so individualistic — there isn’t a “one size fits all” [when it comes to mental health]. But there are generic things that happen, so [...] start small, think about three core emotions: when do you feel happy, sad or stressed, and check in with yourself daily, weekly, monthly.

Then, reach out to colleagues and friends and employers. It takes a village to preserve mental health, but know those benchmarks for yourself.

Stay focused on your own goals and advocate for yourself

NC: Don’t focus on other people’s successes or their journeys — focus on yourself and then how you all come together. Comparing yourself to other people is so common in this industry, but when you let that go and focus on your own successes and your own achievements, not just your work but who you are as a person — that’s really valuable for your mental health.

You can’t compare yourself to how other people handle stress because there are all these external stimuli that people react to differently.

CBB: Advocate for yourself and be really specific. I think a lot of the time, we think our problems are really niche; when actually, they’re universal. So, having the courage to share with your line manager what you’re struggling with is important.

If you are a line manager, start a group and bring together more senior members of staff for specific areas that people need support with. Mental health is this phrase that we throw around — but I think, until we get specific with the things that people are struggling with, we can’t support them effectively.

If you are an employer, bring experts into workplaces so they can share their expertise, because a lot of the time the line managers — they’re amazing fashion designers, but they’re not incredible therapists.

ZM: [...] Everybody in the team might be stressed but people in that team are going to react to that stress differently, depending on their upbringing, the economy, their previous experiences. You can’t compare yourself to how other people handle stress because there are all these external stimuli that people react to differently, because of their past experiences and several other factors.

Explore and leverage the resources available

EMC: For me, the number one thing you can do is speak up — don’t suffer in silence. If your company is lucky enough to have an HR department, I know I’m biassed, but they’re there for a reason. Befriend your HR partner — go for a coffee and talk to them. If you don’t feel comfortable raising some of the issues with your line manager, they can really be that go-between, that third party, a sounding board even.

Also, part of their role is to make sure that they can support you and point you towards the resources available to you, whether that’s access to counsellors or if it’s a retail business, those people signed up to The Retail Trust — they’ll have a huge amount of resources that can protect you.

Advocate for yourself and be really specific. I think a lot of the time, we think our problems are really niche, when actually, they’re universal.

ZM: Every single thing in the workplace can cause poor mental health if not executed properly. What’s important for people stepping into roles is being able to ask — what is set up to help with mental health? Asking those questions doesn’t make it look like you’re mentally ill — it shows that you have leadership skills or seniority skills, being able to put yourself first in the bigger picture sense.

Set feasible boundaries and stick to them

NC: I haven’t been good at setting myself boundaries in the past. The best way I do it now is, when I’m doing life stuff, no work stuff can permeate it. When I’m on holiday, I delete slack and move my email away so I don’t see notifications — because as soon as I think “Oh, I’ll check one email” — you end up checking all of them. So carve out that time and those boundaries and be strict with them.

EMC: Boundaries are critical but we have to be careful not to go too far in that, because sometimes we can limit our growth if we don’t seize that opportunity that is slightly outside of our job spec.

[...] When you go into an interview, it is also about interviewing the brand that you’re going to work with, and thinking about whether they’re a good fit for you and your wellbeing. It’s a two-way street.

ZM: If you’re having to push an employer to take mental health seriously, is that employer right for you? That’s something you should really consider.

Scentbird co-founder and chief executive Mariya Nurislamova is no stranger to the entrepreneurship speaking circuit. She regularly takes the stage at business conferences and shares her views on podcasts, where she expounds on how she approaches fundraising, marketing, branding and products at her start-up, which sells subscriptions to receive fragrance samples from brands such as Burberry and D.S. & Durga.

At the same time, Nurislamova has built a parallel following as a guru, who talks to some 300,000 followers across YouTube, Spotify, TikTok and Instagram about extraterrestrials and how we are all living in “the Matrix,” along with wellness tropes such as meditation, chakras and crystals. On those channels, she describes herself as a “spiritual teacher, intuitive, channel and writer.”

The founder’s two worlds rarely intersected until recently. But Nurislamova’s more extreme spiritual musings have begun making the rounds on social media; YouTube videos dissecting her views have garnered over 670,000 views. For the first time, large numbers of Scentbird customers and brand ambassadors are seeing clips of Nurislamova’s beliefs.

Many don’t like what they’re seeing.

“I won’t be working with them moving forward if they offer me anything in the future,” wrote YouTuber Zachary Michael, an influencer who had worked with Scentbird. He shared the comment under a video about Nurislamova posted last week by the channel Keya’s World, which is focused on debunking spiritual guru claims.

The video, and others like it, comb through TikTok posts and 603 YouTube videos shared by Nurislamova since May 2020. They show her asserting it is possible to “heal yourself” from cancer or AIDS in seven days, that miscarriage is a “choice” and not an “accident” and that abortion will negatively impact one’s karma. These clips are posted alongside ideas such as “consuming honey makes you a better person,” that crooked teeth are not “random,” “tomatoes and potatoes are here to keep you sick” and “coffee is bad for your aura.”

Nurislamova’s views on “the Matrix” have attracted the most attention. She frequently endorses the idea that humans are living inside a video game-like, “virtual reality-type system,” as she calls it in one of her videos. It was while discussing this concept in a May 2022 video with her husband, Scentbird co-founder and chief product officer Sergei Gusev, that she described Hitler as “the greatest – one of the greater – sources of knowledge of 3D planet earth warfare.”

“Do you know how many millions of souls benefited from learning from the experience he has created? So is he evil? Not really. I don’t think so,” she said.

When asked by The Business of Beauty about that statement, Nurislamova said, “Videos are really taken out of context, so they take a very small portion of what actually was said, and when you remove the context, the message really changes.” She also stated, “Because I perceive everything as oneness, of course, murder is not okay. Absolutely freaking not. I would never endorse that. Never, ever in a billion years.”

Complaints about Nurislamova’s viewpoints are so far contained to comments sections on social media, and beauty and fragrance Reddit threads. But her videos present a jarring contrast with Scentbird, a 10-year-old business that bills itself the “Netflix of fragrance,” where customers can opt to receive samples via mail for a monthly fee. Unlike many wellness brands that can be found at Goop or Erewhon, the closest Scentbird comes to mystical, new-age marketing language is a “scent horoscope” recommendation tool on its site.

The company emerged during the mid-2010s boom in subscription fashion and beauty boxes, participating in the tech incubator Y Combinator and raising $25 million from venture capital firms including Goodwater Capital, Rainfall Ventures, FundersClub, Soma Capital and others.

Nurislamova told The Business of Beauty that Scentbird has had growth of “45 to 50 percent year-over-year for the past two years,” and that the company has been profitable since 2019. She said revenue is “well above $100 million” annually with over 700,000 subscribers.

She said she does not bring her beliefs into the workplace, and used only her first name on most of her spirituality content in an effort to “protect Scentbird.” She noted, “I’d be surprised if my investors knew,” and that they “know my character.” Several investors contacted by The Business of Beauty did not respond to requests for comment. While Gusev appears frequently in her spirituality videos, where she says he hypnotised her to bring her into a “deep theta state,” she said Andrei Rebrov, a co-founder and chief technology officer, “did not know I had an account until two days ago.” Rebrov did not provide a response by the time of publication. A fourth co-founder, Rachel ten Brink, left the company in 2019 and did not respond to a request for comment.

“My name was really not all that much out there,” Nurislamova said.

Origin Story

Nurislamova says on her YouTube channel that she had a spiritual “awakening” in 2018. She said she began watching videos about astral projection and eventually had visions in a dream involving a spirit speaking to her.

She began posting on the new accounts early in the pandemic, a time when conspiracy theories, new-age spirituality and pseudoscientific health content were taking off online. One of her earliest podcasts in 2020, recorded with Gusev, criticised Covid-19 measures including mask-wearing and stay-inside policies, saying a “victim mentality” and “underlying energy” would make it more likely to contract Covid-19 or increase its severity.

Nurislamova told The Business of Beauty “I am not a conspiracy theorist.” However, the subjects of her hundreds of videos have ranged widely, and often dovetail with beliefs held by right-wing conspiracy theorists. That includes her recent exploration of the “Starseed” theory that posits the existence of human-alien hybrids, a belief system held by the “Q-Anon Shaman” made famous by his unusual appearance at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, among others. She describes her belief in “visitor souls coming from all types of planets, constellations, star systems, different galaxies, even.”

Nurislamova has built a business around her beliefs, including books and events. Last month, she held a 28-person, spiritual retreat in Glastonbury that, for $1,111, promised to “tap into the mystical energies associated with Glastonbury.” She charges $3,000 for a private online spirit-channelling session and $125,000 for a “one-on-one in-person transformational retreat.”

But to a different audience, many of her statements are bizarre, and offensive.

In a Jun. 6 video receiving over 100,000 views, YouTuber Noor Jasmine, who has done sponsored content for Scentbird in the past, called out Nurislamova’s claims made about hair colour, including “it’s hard for people with black hair colour to be intuitive in decision-making. They’re also not as good at discernment. Things like dancing and moving their body comes very naturally; things like sports come very naturally.”

“If you guys have watched my channel, you’ll know that Scentbird has sponsored a lot of my videos,” said Jasmine in the 38-minute video. When commenters on a recent sponsored post alerted her to Nurislamova’s content, “I was like, ‘damn,’ like really? This sucks. … I really like Scentbird,” she said.

While Nurislamova said she did her best to keep her two worlds separate, now that her content is being directly linked with her brand, she doesn’t plan to take anything down.

“I think it’s a good thing, actually, that this whole convergence is happening,” she said. “I think it was just a matter of time. … I’m glad that it’s coming to the surface that I’m both of those things.”