“I’ve come to believe that we should never wear nail polish,” says Ashley English in the soft, whispery voice that is par for the wellness influencer course. “Our nails are alive,” she continues, in a video spliced with shots of her tanned hands holding pieces of fruit or running her fingers in a stream.
This, she explains, is because our hands are “sending out signals and taking in information on a very subtle yet powerful level.” Covering them with toxic nail polish has “immense effects”.
English often beams such wisdom to her 163,000 Instagram followers. She doesn’t wear perfume for similar reasons, and said in a recent video where she shows off her toned, tanned stomach, that “high rise pants are stifling your creative energy”. It has to be said, she is radiant – she looks like Bella Hadid and seems to live the life of a woodland nymph.
So what does English like? Her favourite breakfast is raw ground beef, or raw milk and honey mixed with an egg yolk (“I also eat the shell for calcium”).
There is a new breed of earth mama influencers who fall somewhere in between trad wife, crunchy teen, and Goop-obsessed wellness girlie. They are usually American but might spend half the year in Bali. They are into illegal substances like raw milk and feel strongly about following the ways of our cavemen ancestors. They hate shoes.
Their beliefs straddle spirituality and pseudoscience. Some are harmless (English believes in dragons and magic), others are dangerous.
“Eat your sunscreen, stop wearing it,” advises Carnivore Aurelius, another popular Instagram account with 1 million followers. He argues that your diet can “protect you from the sun” – the trick is to stop eating toxic seed oils and start eating things like oysters, watermelon, and collagen supplements. Handily, Carnivore Aurelius makes his own collagen powder which is showed off in the video.
English is also a sun cream sceptic. “Coconut oil is what I use in super high UV,” she says, adding that it is SPF 5. The trick, she says, is not to wear sunglasses, so your irises know you are in the sun and send the correct signals to your brain. English says she also gets sun protection from the red raspberry seed oil in the face oil she sells through her brand, Earth & Ash.
Donald Trump’s controversial health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr has rallied against companies like Johnson & Johnson for using “carcinogenic ingredients” in their sun cream, leading to wellness influencers spreading the myth that it’s actually sun cream which is causing skin cancer. Dermatologists unilaterally condemn anti-sunscreen influencers, and say that the carcinogenic ingredients like benzene are in such trace amounts that they would have no impact.
The foundations of RFK Jr’s mission to “make America healthy again” (MAHA) are built from a mix of woo-woo tin foil hat theories peppered with some scientifically sound beliefs. He is an anti-vaxxer who wants to remove fluoride from the country’s water supply, despite the fact that fluoridated water is credited as the greatest dental health innovation of the last century. But he is also an advocate for organic farming and wants to remove harmful additives and dyes from American junk food.
That’s part of what makes the woo-woo influencers pernicious. Ashley English rails against synthetic fibres like polyester and viscose. Partly because they are “low vibration”, but also because they can leach microplastics into the skin, especially during a workout. English is onto something when she says we should ditch the Lululemon and wear cotton workout clothes. But it’s that blend of fact and fiction that makes it hard to disentangle the sound advice from the disinformation.
While their theories may be unconventional, the earth mama wellness influencers typically cleave to traditional Christian values.
In a video following the “propaganda I am falling for” TikTok trend, English says she is a fan of “men protecting”, “trusting God”, and “dressing modestly” (as well as organ meats and farmers markets). She and others rally against birth control. Wellness influencer Taylor Gossett tells her nearly 100,000 followers that hormonal contraception is “toxic”, and has a masterclass in natural birth control.
Meanwhile, Carnivore Aurelius posts videos where he gives a to-do list to his followers: “Get healthy, get married, love your husband and wife, have babies, homeschool them”. He pinches videos from the holy grail of trad wives, Hannah Neeleman aka @BallerinaFarm – a Mormon mother of eight running an organic farm in Utah.
These wellness gurus are often beautiful and appear to lead charmed lives, meaning their followers are more likely to take their advice. A carnivore influencer called Steak and Butter Gal says “I haven't eaten a single piece of fruit, vegetable or grain of sugar in six years”. The result? “I’ve lost 40 pounds, cured my rosacea and my acne.” That causality is everywhere – an attitude of “this worked for me, so it must be true”.
And people are buying into it. A 2024 study by personal training app Zing Coach found that more than half of Gen Z are getting their wellness and diet advice from TikTok. Yet when the University of Chicago analysed thousands of health advice TikTok videos, they found that nearly half of them contained misinformation.
Ironically, modern technology is aiding the comeback of old wives’ tales, just repackaged for the TikTok age – patriarchal values dressed up as spirituality, bizarre diet advice, and definitely no high-waisted jeans.
