Last Saturday, the wellness influencer and podcaster Jordan Younger, known as the Balanced Blonde, posted an Instagram Story of her evacuating from her Brentwood home with her family because of the wildfires, heading for her childhood home in Sacramento. A couple days later, she followed up with a post showing her grinning and sipping out of a clay mug.
“I’ve put together my top detox supplement recs for all who are affected by the toxic smoke from the LA wildfires <3,” she wrote, linking to an Amazon list including a $50 liposomal glutathione supplement intended for “liver detox” and a $999 humidifier. In small print in the upper left-hand corner, Amazon notes that Younger earns a commission off all sales. In an email to the Cut, Younger said that she created the list in response to questions from followers about what supplements she was taking to recover from the effects of smoke inhalation, and that she makes “literal pennies” from her Amazon sales commissions. “I also have committed to donating everything I make from affiliate links this week to wildfire relief, which I’ve publicly shared many times,” she wrote.
A popular wellness influencer and podcaster with more than 250,000 Instagram followers, Younger has used her platform to post fundraising links for friends who lost homes in the wildfires. But she’s also one of many Instagram wellness influencers who have temporarily pivoted from their usual routine of hawking webinars, coaching sessions, and shakes and supplements to promoting products and regimens specifically targeted at survivors of the L.A. wildfires, which have killed at least 25 people and left thousands homeless. This started taking place “pretty much as soon as the fires started,” says Mallory DeMille, a contributor to the podcast Conspirituality who made a video about wellness influencers peddling non-evidence-backed treatments for wildfire victims.
The influencer Jasyra Santiago Hines, who markets herself as a “holistic non-toxic RN,” posted a list of her favorite supplements to help “support and detox the body” during the wildfires and included her own promotional code for discounts on supplements like glutathione, raw milk and honey, and a product called Lung Shield, a $64 herbal supplement containing organic mullein leaf, star anise, and reishi mushroom. The functional-medicine practitioner Season Johnson also used Instagram to promote various supplements and essential oils from doTerra, the Utah-based multilevel marketing company, which she said help “support healthy detox from the toxic affects of wildfire smoke,” encouraging followers to leave a comment to get a “friends & family” discount on the essential oils. (It should go without saying that the Environmental Protection Agency does not specifically recommend essential oils as part of its protocols for wildfire victims and instead advises those who live in affected areas to wear N95 masks, shower after being outdoors to get rid of smoke and ash particles, and use a high-quality air-filtration system.)
Some influencers have even tailored their wildfire-treatment protocols to their specific brands. The holistic health coach and influencer Eva Hooft, who typically promotes parasite cleanses and shares photos of her own fecal matter, offered a seven-day free trial to her “liver detox guide” and a 45 percent discount off an air-filter brand. Kim Rogers, another parasite-cleanse advocate known as Kim the Worm Queen on TikTok, also used the wildfires as an opportunity to tell her 500,000 followers about her self-branded $100 “Support Kit” (including a supplement to firm up loose stools, made of coconut-activated charcoal and cinnamon) and a $65 “metal blaster kit” to ostensibly counter the effects of “environmental toxins, heavy metals, bacteria, viruses” from the wildfire.
Of course, influencers trying to cash in on tragedy or natural disaster is nothing new. As Hurricane Milton hit Florida last year, some creators ignored evacuation orders to stay behind and livestream the storm, leading some commenters to accuse them of risking their lives for monetary gain. And at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-vaxx influencers profited tremendously from fearmongering over masks and lockdowns.
But because Los Angeles is the epicenter of the social-media influencer industry, there seems to be an unusually large number of people attempting to profit off the wildfires, and the sub-Reddit r/LAinfluencersnark has become an unofficial repository for celebrities’ ham-fisted reactions to the tragedy. “I feel like this is a bit tone-deaf,” reads the top comment on a post about Draya Michele, the actor and L.A. Basketball Wives star who posted a video of herself unboxing a Sereniby air purifier and offering $200 off to those who purchased via the link in her bio. (Sereniby CEO Alex Melecki told me Michele was not compensated for the post and that the promo was intended to “help others dealing with the severe air quality in Los Angeles.”)
Admittedly, the line between making money off the disaster and genuinely using one’s platform to help people in need can be somewhat hazy. Many of the influencers linking to their promo codes and Amazon shopping lists also link to GoFundMes for affected families and to organizations like the American Red Cross; some have even been personally impacted, too.
Yet as the fires continue raging and Los Angeles residents slowly start to recover and take stock of the damage, it seems clear that brands and influencers alike are not exactly meeting the moment. Last weekend, the makeup brand Tarte faced intense opprobrium for hosting an influencer trip on a tropical island while L.A. was ablaze; it didn’t help matters that the theme for one of the influencer dinners, according to attendee and influencer Aspyn Ovard, was “Tarte on Fire.” (Tarte previously told the Cut in a statement that “many elements of the trip have been adjusted in real time reaction to the L.A. Wildfires,” including the name of the dinner.) And just a day after the Eaton fires left thousands of families displaced, model Sophia Kelly posted a now-deleted TikTok promoting Cymbiotika Synergy B12 supplements to deal with the effects of the wildfire — which are on sale for $42.99 at the outrageously expensive health-food chain Erewhon — to deal with the effects of the wildfire. Kelly’s followers were unimpressed: “I think there are bigger issues than taking expensive supplements atm,” one commenter sniffed.
Influencers’ success is largely dependent on their ability to market a more palatable version of reality to their followers. But as the wildfires highlight just how much climate change is going to disrupt our lives in the years to come, at least some followers are fed up with influencers’ inability to reflect the actual concerns of their audience. As one commenter on a Reddit thread about Younger’s posts put it: “These people have no fucking shame.”
This story has been updated with comment from Jordan Younger.