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CULTURE & CRITICISM
These Women Say Young Living Essential Oils Has Been Taken Over By Satan. Yes, Really.
“Am I the only Christian woman who is not surprised one bit that an essential oil company would come out as satanic?”
Stephanie McNeal
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on February 17, 2022, at 11:41 a.m. ET
In August 2021, influencer Madison Vining made a big announcement on Instagram. After becoming one of the top sellers for the multilevel marketing essential oils company Young Living, she was quitting.
To her more than 250,000 followers on Instagram and her Young Living team, known as the “Happy Oilers,” the news came as a huge shock. Young Living is one of two of the major essential oils companies in the US, the New Yorker reported in 2017, along with its main rival DoTerra (both claim to be the largest oils company in the world, according to the magazine). Both reportedly reach $1 billion in sales annually and serve millions of customers. Vining, who had worked for Young Living for more than eight years, had reached “Royal Crown Diamond” status; sellers with that status make, on average, $1,645,692 annually or $137,000 a month, according to the company.
People online began to speculate as to why Vining and her husband, Tyler, would leave so much money on the table to start from scratch. When, a few days later, the Vinings announced that they were joining a new wellness-focused MLM, Modere, which is best known for its collagen supplements, rumors swirled that the couple had gotten a huge payout or some other incentive to leave.
For months Vining had kept her reasons for leaving Young Living opaque. But recently, she finally began to spill the tea on social media. One of the reasons the Vinings gave for leaving Young Living? Satan and his demons.
Yes, the prince of darkness. Vining is just one former top Young Living retailer who this month has either insinuated or flat-out said that they left the company after feeling, as devout Christians, that demonic forces were spreading “darkness” among Young Living members.
One former seller, Melissa Truitt, went as far as labeling the company a “cult” in an Instagram story highlight she posted to her account last week and later deleted. Truitt led the charge on the oily “satanic panic” by posting her series of Instagram stories last week accusing the company of spreading “demonic” propaganda through a New Age self-help book it sent to its members earlier this year. She urged Christians still working for Young Living to flee or risk their souls.
“This is so much bigger than money, this is so much bigger than day-to-day life, this is eternal significance,” Truitt said in an emotional Instagram story.
Truitt did not return a request for comment on this story. Vining did not either, and shortly after I reached out, she blocked me on Instagram.
In response to the claims, Young Living said it “did not publish and does not endorse this book in any way.” In a statement, the company said that the book’s co-author, Marcella Vonn Harting, who is a top seller at the company, sent the book to “her own list without the company’s knowledge or consent.” The company denied providing Vonn Harting with anyone’s contact information. (Vonn Harting did not return a request for comment).
“We support a culture of inclusion that we extend to our employees, customers, and brand partners world-wide,” the statement read. “We appreciate and celebrate our members and their diversity of background and belief, and are dedicated to ensuring our brand partners follow our policies and procedures and code of ethics.”
The influencers and former Young Living retailers’ abrupt declarations that the company is satanic are odd to say the least, especially as so many of them, like Vining, have jumped ship to Modere over the past several months, before even receiving the book. Truitt, who had reached the second-highest “Diamond” status, also left Young Living five months ago to join Modere. And other big Young Living sellers slash influencers, like Liz Joy of Pure Joy Home and Monique McLean, abruptly announced they were switching to Modere recently as well.
In fact, so many prominent top Young Living sellers have been leaving that last August Young Living sued some of them, including the Vinings and McLean and her husband, for breach of contract. The lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Utah in August 2021, was dismissed that December at the request of both sides. Still, it provides valuable insight into the breakup of the prominent Instagram essential oil sellers and the company. In the complaint, Young Living accused the McLeans and the Vinings of working to cut a deal with Modere to “raid” Young Living’s business. (McLean did not return a request for comment. Modere also did not return a request for comment.)
“I feel a lot of clarity breaking my silence for things that matter in eternity."
“The named defendants in this case are former, extremely successful Young Living distributors who have meticulously executed a plan to leave Young Living, join a competing business venture, and take as many Young Living distributors and customers with them as possible,” the lawsuit’s complaint read. Young Living declined to comment on the lawsuit.
But now, the influencers are saying that money or alleged backdoor schemes had nothing to do with their decision to leave. Vining wrote on Instagram that the book Truitt denounced was the “tip of the iceberg on this issue,” and she feels better after “denouncing this spiritual darkness” to her followers.
“I feel a lot of clarity breaking my silence for things that matter in eternity,” she wrote.
The denouncement of Young Living as demonic is especially intriguing because so many of its retailers, Vining included, have spent the past several years blending together the principles of alternative wellness and medicine the company espouses with their evangelical Christian beliefs, and to great success.
Young Living was founded in 1993 by D. Gary Young, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who successfully blended his own devout faith with a lifelong passion for alternative remedies.
In a newsletter to Young Living members after her husband’s death in 2018, Gary’s wife, Mary, wrote that her husband’s desire to spread the gospel of essential oils was closely tied to his faith, writing, “God was his foundation.”
“He founded the essential oil movement against tremendous opposition and slander, but he never stopped in his desire to serve God’s children,” Young wrote. For many years, alternative remedies like essential oils were stereotyped to be the purview of hippie-dippie rich people, but, as Rachel Monroe wrote in the New Yorker in 2017, essential oils have also caught on more broadly among women all over the US.
“Wellness is often dismissed as frivolity, another way for wealthy white women to spend money and obsess about their bodies,” she wrote. “But you’re just as likely to find essential oils in a small-town drugstore in the Midwest as in an organic market in L.A.”
Over the past decade or so, many of the devotees who made it big in Young Living shared similarities with Vining. They were young wives and mothers in the heartland who were devoted evangelical Christians, and they also seemed to have a suspicion of mainstream medicine.
According to Vining, once she stopped buying mainstream medicinal and home products and dove into essential oils, her life changed dramatically. In 2017, she wrote about how her family had decided to start a “wellness journey” three years before after learning about “the dangers lurking in our home that were making us sick.”
“There are ingredients in everyday things like baby lotion, dish soap, dryer sheets… all linked to cancer, infertility, and disease. We just didn’t know,” she wrote. “We slowly but surely took a trash bag through our home and began to read labels. Into the trash bag went candles, over the counter drugs, shampoo — anything that was setting us or our kiddos up for failure with our health.”
Vining never specified what ingredients exactly were making her family sick but claimed that once she threw out the products she saw a huge difference. And once she found Young Living and began using oils, Vining claimed, her family no longer needed to rely on “toxic” Western medicine.
“We use essential oils for everything in our home, from seasonal irritations outdoors, to first aid type of things, to helping regulate hormones and emotions and all that good stuff, and of course restful sleep!” she wrote. “They’ve blessed our family so so much.”
As the Vinings’ platform grew (in 2017, Vining wrote she had 58,000 people under her in the business), the couple used the proceeds from their essential oil business to spread the gospel of Jesus, effectively combining the two parts of her life.