Jena Covello is nothing if not a truth-teller. She can’t help it. Deep within the pit of her gut, her truth bubbles and churns. It grows hotter and taller until it cannot be contained, and it shoots out into the world, unbidden. It’s not an urge, because it’s almost metabolic. It’s what’s gotten her into the situation she is currently in, which is perched atop a successful clean-beauty business.
Whether her truth and the truth are fully aligned is a murkier matter, but so is clean beauty, a term even Covello admits she doesn’t love. “I have a problem with the word ‘clean’—I always have,” she told me recently over Zoom. “And I’ve been very transparent on my Instagram feed about the problem with using that word, and how it gives all chemicals a bad name.” Covello is in Paris on business as usual; her supplement line is debuting at Dior’s recently rejuvenated Plaza Athenée spa, and she’s staying down the Seine at the Hôtel Costes. The crimson room intensifies the red in her hair, as if drawing the color out of the walls, and when I make the error of observing this out loud, she is ready to correct me, precisely, bluntly, with her truth, which is that “Hmm, I don’t know, I think it’s golden.”
(On a second look, I do kind of believe her.)
Covello’s brand, Agent Nateur, is a post-Goop wellness success story that came to market in 2015 with a luxuriously packaged aluminum-free deodorant in a “non-toxic” formulation, originally priced at $21. Today, Agent Nateur spans multiple categories and continents and can be found in the golden corridors of Parisian spas, in strip-mall Vitamin Shoppes nationwide, and at nearly every other point of sale on the taste spectrum in between: Nordstrom, Revolve, Net-a-Porter, Amazon.
Covello is unlike most other founders of beauty companies, mostly because she is not a makeup artist or pop star. Instead, she has cultivated an audience by becoming a voice on a broad range of extra-cosmetic issues, from vaccines to American foreign policy. She might post critiques of the Biden administration and woke liberals from the pulpit of her fleeting Instagram Stories. She might discuss “the truth about fluoride” or “How PC Culture Is Corrupting the Mainstream Media” on an episode of her podcast (Nateurious). She might be inclined to begin our interview by explaining how a lawsuit with Los Angeles’s Kabbalah Centre became one of the truest truths Covello ever had to tell.
Covello is unlike most other founders of beauty companies, mostly because she is not a makeup artist or pop star.
In 2015, a jury awarded Covello, who then went by Jena Scaccetti, nearly $200,000 in compensatory and punitive damages following a sexual assault lawsuit involving Yehuda Berg (the “rabbi to the stars,” according to the Daily Mail), whose family founded the Kabbalah Centre. At the time, Covello worked in the fashion industry, assisting Hollywood stylists and launching her own kids’-clothing line. She had also been a practitioner of Kabbalah for almost a decade. The suit cost her her community, her faith, and her name.
“Everyone there turned against me, pretty much the entire community. They said I was lying. And the women who he had also had altercations with, you know, were just silent. They were very afraid to confront him.”
The association with the trial embarrassed her, and she took her mother’s maiden name, Covello, to distance herself from it. In the end, she developed a sense of resolve about the events, despite the toll they took on her. “I don’t think he’s doing those things to anyone anymore,” she said. “I felt like I stopped being a victim. And I really took my power back through confronting him.” She is used to people not believing what she has to say, and she is just as used to trying to prove them wrong.
Next to Godliness?
But how do we refer to Agent Nateur, her collection of body care, skin care, and supplements, if not by the c-word? If it looks like a clean-beauty brand—with its cruelty-free and ecological certifications, with its founder who parses parabens—it doesn’t describe itself as one. Agent Nateur is luxurious, “with a focus on quality and efficacy,” according to the brand’s official lore. Everything is glossily packaged and premiumly priced.
Covello is the “agent of nature” herself. She earned the nickname around the same time she earned a reputation among co-workers at her fashion job for always carrying supplements and giving health advice. In 2014, she had an experience with ayahuasca that left her with a clear message: it was time for a new project, though Covello couldn’t yet see what it might turn out to be. Three weeks after the mood-altering experience, she began—to her own bewilderment—formulating deodorant in her kitchen. “I know it opened me up to something,” she said, of the ayahuasca, “because I’m like, ‘Why am I cooking deodorant all of a sudden?’”
Except for a GoFundMe she set up for packaging components, Covello started her line without any outside investment. She Airbnb’ed the other bedroom in her Los Angeles apartment as she set about establishing Agent Nateur’s branding: sparse, elegant, vaguely Christian. Her first product, a deodorant, was named holi(stick) (like holistic) and newer launches have followed suit—holi(oil), holi(water). (Any religious allusion is apparently unintentional, though perhaps evocative; “Cleanliness is next to … ,” etc.) It was also important that the brand name reflect Covello’s affinity for France, where Covello studied cosmetics. “Nature” is, unfortunately, the same in French as in English; hence “nateur,” a word that’s about as French as Glossier or Estée.
Now, eight years later, Covello is a presence in wellness, and anyone who travels anywhere seeking nutrition, absolution, or luxury skin care is at risk of encountering Agent Nateur’s product lines.
“We’re one of her best retailers right now,” said Vito Antoci, executive vice president of Erewhon, the glamorous health-food markets in Los Angeles. Antoci has been credited with turning the store’s cachet into cash through streetwear and smoothie collaborations. (The store sold around $9 million worth of Hailey Bieber’s Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie, according to Antoci.) This summer, Agent Nateur debuted its own Erewhon blend, flavored with peanut butter, maple syrup, salt, and a heaping scoop of holi(mane). Agent Nateur is a hit at Erewhon, which is to say it is a hit in the center of the wellness universe.
Gee Beauty, a boutique in Miami, was one of Agent Nateur’s earliest retailers. One of its owners, Natalie Gee, hypothesizes that the brand owes no small part of its success to the relationship between Covello and her audience. “I think she’s very well connected to them, and they’re very interested in her,” Gee says. (Whether they gather despite or due to her irrepressible opinion stream is not exactly clear, and may be irrelevant.) “People really want to feel part of something. They want to feel part of the Agent Army.”
“I know it opened me up to something,” she said, of the ayahuasca, “because I’m like, ‘Why am I cooking deodorant all of a sudden?’”
The Agent Army refers to Covello’s fans and followers. A cursory estimate based on Instagram followings puts their total population at over 160,000—a relatively small audience for a beauty company, if robust for a militia. Covello’s own followers flock to her page to glimpse scenes from her life, which usually feature gorgeous hotels or head-to-toe Chanel ensembles, and sometimes both. They also come for her always pure, never diluted opinions on health and, increasingly, government health policy. The brand’s Instagram following appeared to more than double during the pandemic. Covello’s following tripled. But lately, any user who attempts to join the Army is greeted with a disclaimer from Instagram: “Are you sure you want to follow jenacovello? This account has repeatedly posted false information that was reviewed by independent fact-checkers or went against our community guidelines.”
Trust Issues
Covello is happy to be in Paris, and at the Hôtel Costes, one of her European sanctuaries. (She once told an interviewer she formulates each of her products “mostly” at the Costes.) Covello is a daughter of New Jersey but at home anywhere in the Western world where there are palm trees and Hermès boutiques, and she divides her time among Los Angeles, Miami, and the South of France.
During Covello’s childhood in Trenton, work was never far from play. Her father was in real estate, her mother in administration, and Covello was delivering papers by age 10. She would later embark on a career in the fashion industry, first designing shoes for Nina Delman in New York, but she tired of the work after a few years. “I think I like to wear them more than I like to design them.”
Travel to and from manufacturers in Italy and China did not make things easier for Covello’s health. Covello has stage-four endometriosis and adenomyosis, two gynecological conditions that result in uterine tissues growing where they shouldn’t be. She described how her attempts at seeking treatment bred a mistrust of the medical profession, and how many people that have endometriosis have been failed by doctors and science. “I’ll tell you exactly when the skepticism began for me,” she said. Covello had her first surgery in 2003 and another in 2008. By 2010, she was regularly going to the emergency room in unbearable pain. Together with a holistic dermatologist, she intuited that the issue had to do with a closed fallopian tube, a hunch that was confirmed after numerous doctor visits and another operation.
The period up to and including the launch of her clean-beauty brand saw Covello’s ascent to a new mission: one of self-healing, by any means necessary. She did what many in her position decide to do: took research into her own hands.
When I ask what kinds of political topics Covello wants to discuss with her following, she begins by clarifying, “I’m not for or against a vaccine.” But she does believe a line is crossed when it comes to mandating them in workplaces. “When the government starts to get involved and starts to, you know, make mandates or when someone’s job is at risk.... For me that’s where the issue is.”
The period up to and including the launch of her clean-beauty brand saw Covello’s ascent to a new mission: one of self-healing, by any means necessary.
Covello is aware of how her views come across in the greater beauty community. She has a theory about that too. “My line is better than 99 percent of the lines out there, but they avoid me, especially in the press, because of my views,” she once told a podcast guest, who had just been explaining how the C.I.A. invented the term “conspiracy theorist” to “counteract those people who were telling the truth.” She continued, “It’s really despicable. If we’re in this callout culture, the people who are in this holistic space for the right reason, they’re being attacked, and not being included in this beauty world.”
As a member of the beauty press, I find it unlikely that Covello is being blacklisted. This year began with a Forbes profile; the brand’s new sunscreen was covered in Vogue. But word gets around, and the relationship between Agent Nateur and the beauty establishment is not unblemished.
Attendance at the brand’s press events took a slight hit early this summer after Covello posted a letter to her Instagram Stories criticizing the White House’s Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act—in her words, the “criminal Biden administration’s new MOCRA law” and the pressure it put on small businesses. “The left hates the American Dream.” (Covello emphasized to me that she could not help but respond. “I am always going to defend small businesses because I experienced firsthand how difficult it is to try to manufacture a product when you’re starting out,” she said.)
A Los Angeles–based beauty writer, Elizabeth Denton, was incensed enough to repost Covello’s letter, adding, “Good luck getting any coverage with your anti-science BS.”
Then Denton went to dinner, where she started getting messages from friends, saying, in effect, “Hey, did you know this woman is going off on you in her stories?” Denton had blocked Covello after posting about her, but her notifications began to fill up with unfamiliar usernames that read almost in code, like cleanlife and Freedom.Fighter. The Agent Army was reporting for duty.
A Woman of the People
It’s an inconvenient truth that the market for natural deodorants, like the one Covello cooked up in her kitchen, owes its everything to fake news and fake science. In the early 90s, an anonymous chain letter began appearing in e-mail inboxes. “The leading cause of breast cancer is the use of anti-perspirant,” it read.
The letter asserted that anti-perspirants trap toxins that are usually excreted in sweat in the body, where they collect in breast tissue. Snopes, a fact-checking Web site, debunked the claim in 2000. Humans don’t expel their toxins through sweat; we do so in other, more conspicuous ways.
The e-mail hoax doesn’t mention aluminum salts at all, but by the early 2000s, researchers were searching for a link between anti-perspirant, specifically aluminum in anti-perspirants, and breast cancer. Those studies did not demonstrate a link. The American Cancer Society and European Commission have assured us that aluminum-salt deodorants are not at all harmful; still, they’ve taken on the pallor of deli meat. They can’t hurt us, but, well, maybe you’d prefer another option anyway?
The market for aluminum-free anti-perspirants with names like Pit Paste was slim in 2015, but it was just big enough for Covello to slip in. She says that in the early days of Agent Nateur, many retailers came to her, instead of the other way around—they’d seen her marketing and wanted to know more. To the rest, Covello and friends would send carefully wrapped packages with handwritten notes.
It’s an inconvenient truth that the market for natural deodorants, like the one Covello cooked up in her kitchen, owes its everything to fake news and fake science.
Today, the Agent Nateur team numbers 40, the products span multiple categories, a manufacturing center is under construction, and a sunscreen just came out: holi(sun) is a tinted serum made with zinc oxide as opposed to a chemical UV filter, which Covello insists can seep into the blood. This is a bit of truth that sounds menacing when cleaved entirely from context. But for the record, mineral filters can reach the blood, too; the F.D.A. stresses that “absorption does NOT equal risk,” emphasis theirs; chemical filters are still widely used in the E.U. and Japan, where sunscreens—as well as cosmetics—are subjected to stricter regulation than they are in the United States. (Covello has criticized both the F.D.A.’s lack of oversight and the F.D.A.’s attempts to oversee.)
The beauty industry’s history is studded with toxic experiments—a century ago, some moisturizers obtained their glow from radium—but so is almost everything else. We don’t drink Starbucks coffee or apply cream-to-powder blushes because we know they’re safe for the body, but because we are reasonably certain they aren’t unsafe. Between states of skepticism and searching, clean beauty flourishes.
A few weeks before our interview in New York, Covello hosted a dinner to celebrate the sunscreen. It was a Sunday in the Gregorian calendar but a Thursday in the context of Fashion Week; it had been raining outside all day, but it was warm and dry and also a little wet inside Emilio’s Ballato downtown. Thirty beauty editors and influencers clinked wine glasses, and the room was littered with tiny quilted Chanel bags.
The table: far too long and far too crowded. The furnishings: strongly indicated that the room was usually reserved for storage. It was possible to taste the glamour, if you shut your eyes tightly and reminded yourself, repeatedly, that this was Rihanna’s favorite restaurant. Or you could knock three Chanel bags to the floor as you tried to maneuver around the table’s end, whose occupants were wedged hazardously against the wall. Emilio himself was taking drink orders.
Covello teetered about on stilettos and wore a white minidress. The event looked, at times, like a wedding reception that excluded straight men. “I’m so happy you could come, thank you!” she said to guest after guest, sounding like she meant it. We all raised our glasses, because how could we not?
Brennan Kilbane is a New York–based writer. He is originally from Cleveland, and his interviews and essays have appeared in GQ, New York magazine, and Allure, where he was recently on staff as a features writer
