So Clean You Can Eat It!

Do you sometimes feel like everything is evolving into what it should have been to begin with, that to move forward we must move backward? What we put on our skin—like what we eat—if made with synthetic ingredients, can disrupt hormones, trigger allergies and sensitivities, and exacerbate physical issues we are hoping to heal.

Similar to a chef or nutritionist, skin care product developers who source their ingredients from nature and also consider your well-being are like apothecaries, trusting the power of plants rather than synthetic chemicals that might do more harm than good. Safe and food-grade ingredients in our skin care products are important, because what we put on our skin—our largest organ—ends up inside our body.

The companies highlighted here are making products that heal and nourish the skin, without compromise, and their success is proof of a growing and sustainable trend of skin care, rooted in health, purity, transparency and environmental stewardship.

Daron Hope, founder of EarthTonics, focuses on protecting and working with the skin’s microbiome in her formulations.

EARTHTONICS: Pure and Plant-Powered

In the same way that enjoying a good meal is about more than the food, healthy skin is about more than what you put on it. Daron Hope, founder of EarthTonics, says that what you eat, your hydration, emotions and nervous system all contribute to the health of your skin. She considers herself a skin-care chef, creating healing tonics for the skin that she hopes are also part of a process or ritual where you return to yourself and check in on those other spaces.

Daron had sensitive, acne-prone skin and the products she was using were making her symptoms worse. “I was always one of those people, where my skin was communicating with me on behalf of my entire body,” she says. “I was waging war on my skin with chemicals and acids, but as I learned more about the holistic nature of our skin, I realized we can’t treat our skin as if it’s something separate from our body.”

So she switched gears, and started using simple things from her kitchen like cold-pressed olive oil, honey and yogurt, which were at least more soothing than what she had been using. She began studying herbalism and became a licensed aesthetician, and it was then that she utilized the power of plant medicine using simple, unadulterated ingredients, and developed a few formulas that worked for her. The next step was to make sure they would work for other people, so Daron shared them with friends and family, and they came back for more.

That was 16 years ago. “After several years selling my formulas locally at the farmers’ market, I offered bespoke facials out of The EarthTonics Facial Studio for a decade,” she says. “The herbs are insanely beautiful and healing for the skin, but the products were also a catalyst for self-love,” she says. “I’ve noticed for myself and others that when we make skin health our goal and self-love our practice, vibrant, authentic beauty awakens in us. There is a certain kind of radiance that gets ignited by having the courage to love and accept ourselves. I am passionate about the impact this has in people’s lives, when they feel beautiful in their skin.”

Rather than harsh ingredients that cause more problems than they solve, Daron focused on protecting and working with the skin’s own microbiome. “Similar to the gut microbiome in our digestive system, the skin barrier, which also has to do with pH and natural lipids, needs to be supported and intact, and ingredients that feed it rather than disrupt it,” she says. “I am committed to nutrient- dense skin care, made from the purest, most potent and bioactive botanical ingredients I can find.”

Her “tonics” soon became her full-time business, and she opened an apothecary for customers and practitioners in a studio adjacent to her home in Ojai. In 2022 the EarthTonics Apothecary expanded to a warehouse nearby, where she blends everything in-house, sells and refills the tonics for local customers, and ships across the U.S. The tonics are made with ethical and fair-trade ingredients, packaged in 100% recyclable violet glass and shipped with plastic-free shipping. Daron says she wants to be proud of the company beyond the products it sells by building “a community of skin-care purists, holistic practitioners and like-minded businesses that create ripples of beauty” locally and across the world.

A few of the botanical hydrosols in EarthTonics products come from Sweet Mountaintop Farm on Rincon Mountain above Carpinteria, and herbs, oils and other botanical ingredients come from a myriad of other small farms and artisan distillers. The shea butter is produced traditionally, raw and cold-pressed by a women’s co-op in Africa. For every bottle sold, a tree is planted by Trees for the Future, which trains farmers to use permaculture and land management skills to regenerate their land and vary food sources for their families and communities. (For more info visit www.Trees.org.)

EarthTonics Apothecary + Refill Shop is open Thursday– Saturday,11am–3pm at 416 Bryant Circle, Unit O, Ojai | @earthtonics, www.earthtonicsskincare.com

Since starting Rêves de Sabine, Sabine Dodane has made gratitude the cornerstone of her business. She includes a handwritten thank-you note in every online order. Photos by Viktor Budnik.

RÊVES DE SABINE: Dreamy Balms & Scents

After spending much of her career designing packages for corporations, Sabine Dodane now creates not just the outer packaging but also products that meet her own standards—carefully selected and sourced ingredients and minimal and sustainable packaging. To Rêves de Sabine, her skin-care company of nine years, she brings her passion for health and wellness, and her philosophy, which both come directly from nature.

“All my life, I had made natural products for friends and family and I felt it was finally time to quit my job and start making products I could really be proud of and stand by,” says Sabine says. “I wanted to be transparent and ethical with what was in it and how it was made, using only ingredients that benefit the skin and contribute to wellness in some way.”

Rêves de Sabine products are free of preservatives, fillers, emulsifiers, coloring and fragrances, and contain ingredients that are cold-pressed, organic and unrefined. “Nature has everything you need to take care of yourself, and the products also just happened to smell good, simply from the combination of its good fresh ingredients,” says Sabine, who notes that her business is green certified. “I think we are starting to look at the wisdom of nature, and I believe we would be well advised to learn from how natural systems maintain balance, resilience and sustainability.”

Sabine’s philosophy on sourcing is to get her ingredients from a manufacturer in the place it originally comes from or has been made for centuries—such as argan oil from Morocco, lavender from France and rose essential oil from Bulgaria—but she also sources locally when feasible and it suits her products well, such as lavender from Frog Creek Farm in Ojai and sage honey from Blue Ridge Honey in Ventura.

Her passion project also brought a shift in the way she approaches customers. Instead of developing a product and then trying to convince someone they should buy it, she listens and develops products in response to her customers’ needs. “It’s all the more rewarding that way, giving me challenges to solve and a better motivation,” says Sabine.

The best-selling Dream Balm was her first product, but her second—the Repair Face Oil—came when a friend asked Sabine to create something healing and pure for the scars left after the removal of malignant skin cancer from her face. During the early days of COVID, Sabine developed three scented sprays—Calm, Uplift and Breathe—to keep her customers’ face masks smelling fresh; they also provided unique aromatherapy benefits during a difficult time.

When clients were asking for eaux de toilette versions of her scents, she hesitated, knowing that traditional spray perfumes generally use alcohol with a bitter, toxic additive to make it unpalatable for consumption. Sabine wanted to be consistent in her commitment to clean ingredients that are beneficial to the skin, so she sourced an additive-free, pure, organic food-grade alcohol and created eaux de toilettes in four new scents.

“You won’t find creams and lotions in our line because both are emulsions, which need emulsifiers, texturizers and water. Preservatives are often added to prevent the growth of bacteria, mold, and yeast, which can spoil the product and pose health risks to the users, but they also disrupt the balance of the healthy microorganisms on your skin,” says Sabine.

She compares using her “fresh” products to eating a fresh-off-the-vine sun-ripened tomato at peak ripeness. “In contrast, a shelf-stable tomato product, while convenient and longer-lasting, often lacks the same freshness and may contain preservatives or added ingredients, resulting in a diminished flavor and nutritional profile compared to its fresh counterpart,” she says. Much like shelf-stable skin-care products. She believes we can have a different relationship with food and self-care.

Rêves de Sabine features oils and serums instead, such as her popular AM/PM face oils, which take a bit more time to work into and penetrate the skin, Sabine says, but they are skin-friendly and respect and protect its natural microbiome.

“The extra effort it takes to apply an oil forces you to take the time to feel what your body needs, improves skin circulation, helps flush out toxins and stimulates the immune system. So it encourages you to take better care of yourself,” she says.

Find Rêves de Sabine at Rainbow Bridge, Ojai, and these markets and events in Ventura: First Fridays Ventura at Bell Arts Factory (1st Fridays), Social Club Market (1st Saturdays), VC Art Market (2nd Saturdays, every other month), Findings Market, Oak St. (spring and fall), Market By the Sea, Ventura Portside Harbor (3rd Saturdays. @revesdesabine, www.revesdesabine.com

Sierra Stover founded Mama Medicine for moms (and others) just like her, so they could feel good about what goes on their own and their baby’s skin. Photos by Mariah Green.

MAMA MEDICINE: Bioavailable Body Butters

Mama Medicine was born not long after the birth of Sierra Stover’s daughter. Sierra was repotting an overgrown aloe plant and ended up with extra leaves, so she made aloe gel. She posted on her Instagram story, asking if anyone was interested in the aloe gel.

“That is how my lash and brow serum was formed, which contains aloe gel, which was the first thing that people wanted to buy,” she says. The growth of this initial interest into a successful skin care company she is able to run from home was an answer to prayer, says the single, stay-at-home mom of a now-2-year-old daughter.

“I’ve been in business one year and I am so grateful because I’m able to be home with my daughter and share my heart with others through my products.” She sells mostly online and by word of mouth, but also sets up shop consistently at the Ojai Community Farmers’ Market. She says she loves being face-to-face with her customers and hearing feedback such as “yours is the only brand I trust” or “your products changed the way I feel about myself.”

Like many new moms, Sierra was passionate about what she put on her daughter’s skin, and her own, and wanted to avoid many of the ingredients in store-bought skin care products. “If I can eat it, then I will use it on my skin,” she says. “I want mothers to feel safe using my products on themselves and their kids, and also offer something safe for the Earth and its oceans.” The company expanded quickly from aloe gel to tallow products such as Reef Safe Sunscreen, Whipped Tallow Butter, and Bug Butter. “Because tallow is so close to our skin’s makeup, it has incredible bioavailability—it’s intelligent and responds to what your body needs,” says Sierra.

She infuses grass-fed and -finished tallow with lavender, rose, chamomile and calendula on low heat on the stove in her kitchen. She prefers using whole-plant infusions, she says, because the plant’s volatile compounds, which allow plants to defend against bugs, attract pollinators and communicate with each other, are more concentrated in essential oils and may disrupt our hormones when used in skin care. She does use cinnamon and vanilla essential oils in her Bug Butter since bugs will avoid those, and a small amount of tea tree oil in her original tallow butter and botanical facial cleanse for their antimicrobial and antiseptic benefits.

Sierra says she would love to find a local farmer to supply the tallow, but for now her source is out of state. The flowers come from Mountain Rose Herbs in Oregon, and the organic shea butter and hexane-free castor oil she uses come from Africa. She recently partnered with Mission Beekeeping for their raw local honey. She still grows her aloe at home, but has a friend in Ojai who grows it if she needs more.

Find Mama Medicine at Ojai Community Farmers’ Market. @mama_medicine, www.shopmamamedicine.com

Danielle Rae, founder of Honey Shine, uses the same yellow flower that her grandmother used in her medicinal salves, but in her own new carefully formulated recipes..

Photos by Mariah Green

HONEY SHINE: From Seeds to Salve

Danielle Rae was pregnant and struggling with eczema. Her grandmother from the Philippines, who had passed a few years earlier, surely would have healed her skin with the brilliant orange flowers she had grown in her yard. But Danielle’s doctor prescribed steroids that she wasn’t comfortable using while pregnant, so she left it untreated. When her son was born and also suffered with eczema, she began a deep dive to find a natural solution.

Calendula, a flower related to marigolds, kept coming up in Danielle’s research. When she realized these were the same flowers her grandmother had grown, she was immediately taken back to her childhood, when remedies came from her grandmother’s kitchen rather than the store.

She bought a pack of calendula seeds, planted them in her yard, and waited for the flowers to bloom. In the meantime, she tried a few calendula products she found on Etsy, and while those provided some relief, they also included ingredients such as alcohol which she learned can further irritate eczema and keep the skin from healing.

Danielle’s grandfather gathered the grandmother’s recipes and her husband encouraged her to keep experimenting, testing each attempt along with her on his own sensitive skin. It took about six months to develop a salve that they both liked, made with oil that she infused with dried calendula flowers for four to six weeks in the warmth of the sun. “At that time, I had mason jars filled with oil and flowers out in the yard—not sure what the neighbors were thinking!” she says.

“We then came up with a proprietary essential oil blend for the salve to add to its healing properties, using calming lavender, copaiba (which is good for pain), bergamot (for a citrusy scent) and a geranium that is good for the skin,” says Danielle. “Customers say the scent is calming and soothing—that it smells like home.”

In 2020, she shared a post on social media about her process of growing the flowers and making the oil, and how it was working for her family, not only for their eczema, but for bug bites, sunburns and scrapes. Several orders came in that same day, so she made the products that night and delivered them in person the next day, Mother’s Day. Before that post, she had only made the salve occasionally as gifts for friends.

That summer, just after Honey Shine launched a website, Little Birds—a kids’ consignment shop in Midtown Ventura—reached out on behalf of their customers (mostly mothers looking for products with clean ingredients for themselves and their kids), and became the first of many wholesale accounts. Honey Shine’s calendula salve was named the best mom and baby product at the 2022 Prego Expo, which they travel to each year.

Honey Shine now has 40 calendula-based products and over 6,000 followers on Instagram, but Danielle says she is most proud of being able to shine the light on calendula, bringing it closer to becoming a mainstay in households. Today, she still grows and harvests her own calendula for Honey Shine products, filling her front and back yards and infusing her oils slowly outside in the sun. She dreams of someday having a calendula farm where she can grow rows and rows of the flowers of her childhood to share with the community.

Find Honey Shine at Makers’ Market in Midtown Ventura, Santa Paula Farmers’ Market, Saticoy Farmers’ Market, Shops in Ventura County such as Little Bird Kids’ Consignment, Blue Ridge Honey in Ventura. @honey_shine_calendula, www.honeyshinecalendula.com

Editor’s Note: Ventura County has an plethora of conscientious skin care products made and sourced locally. Suzanne Luce attended a workshop by GARA’s founder on hydrosols (the foundation of many skincare products). You can read about her experience and what she learned by clicking this QR Code.