by Mell P
She goes by Dr. Icy and the name fits. Calm, precise, and clear-eyed about the stakes, Dr. Icilma Fergus is a cardiologist whose career has been shaped not only by science, but by personal loss. When she was in college, her aunt died while waiting for an upgraded pacemaker. Born with congenital heart block, her aunt had the condition managed for years, but access to timely care failed her at the end.
- Advertisement -
“That inspired me to keep on doing more,” Dr. Fergus says. “And really to go into cardiology itself, to address the issues that we as people of color have.”
Decades later, that mission has not dimmed. It has only expanded.
“A lot of people are in denial. They’re afraid to know something is wrong with their heart. And because of that, it really limits their conversations about their health, until something happens.”
Ask Dr. Fergus what the biggest barrier to heart health is, and she does not hesitate. Fear. Denial. The quiet assumption that heart disease only happens to the very old, the very unwell, never to someone you know, never to someone like you.
She recalls a recent patient who came in rattled: a 54-year-old colleague had just died of a heart attack after driving himself toward an emergency room he never reached.
“He just wasn’t feeling right,” she says. “And he didn’t want to go see a doctor.”
When someone dies suddenly like that, she explains, the cause is almost always the heart. And yet, in most cases, it did not have to happen. Heart disease, she stresses, is up to 80 percent preventable. Blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, weight, smoking — these are manageable. These are addressable. But only if people are willing to look.
“Knowing ahead of time that there’s a little polyp could mean you’ve caught colon cancer,” she adds, drawing a wider point about preventative screening. “These days, if you start early, there are treatments.”
Dr. Fergus has spent years taking her message beyond clinic walls, into senior centers, sororities, fraternities, and churches. She works with organizations across the community, from D9 Greek-letter groups to The Links, from Real Dads programs to virtual lecture series. She has appeared on television to speak about heart health. She meets people where they are, in spaces where they feel safe enough to ask the questions they would never ask a doctor in a white coat.
“When you raise the question in a non-clinical setting, people listen,” she says. “They ask themselves questions. And then they decide to come in.” More than once, if you start early, there are treatments.”
Dr. Fergus has spent years taking her days.
Her advice to anyone who wonders whether they are really as healthy as they feel: push yourself a little.
Climb the subway stairs. Try to run. If you are winded when you should not be, something may already be brewing. A simple blood test, checking blood sugar, blood pressure, cholesterol, kidney function, thyroid, can give you the picture. “If the blood test is good and you’re feeling okay,” she says, “chances are you’re probably healthy.”
The same instinct that sends Dr. Fergus into community halls also led her, over several years of quiet research and formulation, to launch a new brand: Fiaro Essentials. The name is personal. Fiaro is built from the initials of herself, her children, and her husband.
The pivot from medicine to wellness products was not a departure. It was a continuation. For years, Dr. Fergus had been watching patients arrive with shopping bags full of supplements and skincare products, some of them genuinely harmful, some canceling each other out, none of them vetted by anyone with a medical background.
“She had five hundred dollars’ worth of products from some guy you couldn’t verify,” Dr. Fergus recalls of one patient whose blood pressure had gone haywire.
She also began connecting the dots between certain topical products and serious health effects: alopecia, skin rashes, disrupted blood pressure and kidney function from absorbed toxins.
“That was the wake-up call,” she says. “Take what you’re doing, which was a hobby, and really get it out there.”
“Everything put into the skin gets absorbed. Some of what people are buying, it’s not helping them. It’s hurting them,” says Dr. Fergus on the inspiration for Fiaro Essentials.
Fiaro Essentials launches on May 23rd at the Apollo Stage inside the Renaissance Hotel on 125th Street in Harlem, from 3 pm to 7 p.m. The line features natural body butters blended with shea, almond, mango, and avocado and infused with essential oils such as lavender, eucalyptus, and peppermint.
There are hair oils, face moisturizers, salves for psoriasis and dry skin, beard formulas, and a curated loungewear component to match the lifestyle ethos the brand embodies. No preservatives. No synthetic additives. Safe enough, Dr. Fergus says, for a newborn and effective enough for the elderly.
“Right now I don’t even have on any makeup,” she says, gesturing toward her skin. “But I have a moisturizer cream that helps your face.” She speaks with the understated confidence of someone who has been using, and quietly giving away samples of her own products for years.
Products will also be available after the launch event at www.fiaroessentials.com.
Dr. Fergus does not shy away from the word luxury, she just reframes it.
“Luxury wellness,” she says, “is using my products and lounging at a pool, water under a nice tree.” It is not aspirational excess. It is rest. Care. The deliberate act of tending to yourself.
And if Fiaro Essentials had a theme song? She answers without missing a beat: Diana Ross’s I’m Coming Out. “I want the world to know.”
