The whole long story:
As a busy working Mom, I try to provide my family with a healthy non-toxic environment full of love and wonder and yummy luxurious food. We are "whole foods" organic, which means I cook a ton. I read and research and try to be an informed consumer...which also means I read labels.
One day, after crop-dusting my daughter with spray sun screen in preparation for a long day at summer camp and after admonishing her for coughing and sputtering at the cloud of chemical spray she was forced to endure, (Oh for God's sake! Just hold your breath! It'll only take a second!) I paused and smelled it myself. Hmmmmm... All I can say is, I had smelled this many times before because we all used this product, but for some reason this time was different. I took a minute to take in what was floating in the air around me: It smelled like a horribly, heavily-fragranced noxious cloud of gross chemicals. Uh oh. I slowly rolled the can around and read the label. Ugh.
Well, you probably know where this is going.
After dropping my daughter off at camp, I hopped online and dug in to it. With a growing sense of dread that was matched only by the size of the knot in my stomach (Mom Guilt) I went further and further down the rabbit hole of crap that - I learned - was at that moment being absorbed in to my precious baby's skin and seeping directly into her bloodstream. I had never thought of our skin as a filtration system before. I will spare you the steady string of expletives that erupted as I realized that I should have been more diligent about this matter.
In a fairly mad frenzy I ripped through my cabinets reading the labels of everything we used that touched our skin: lotions, toners, scrubs, soap (SOAP!!!) hand soap, shampoo, conditioner, powders and even, God help me, my make up. I sat for a while taking it all in. Back online. Fresh horrors. How, I wondered, can ANYONE be selling this to us to use on our families?. By lunchtime my cupboards were nearly, as they say, bare. I had nearly filled my outdoor trashcan with the junk I pulled out my house that day. Time to start from over...
I was able to find some acceptable products at the health food stores, but they were still not as pure as I wanted them to be, now that I was a full-fledged lunatic about it. I still had to look stuff up that I founf on those labels. The department store products that claimed to be pure just weren't and were ridiculously expensive for what they actualy were.
How, I wondered, did people make lotions and creams and soap before industry took over? I thought long and hard about it and then I remembered some foot balm I had once found in a cute little country store in Cape Cod that was the only thing I had ever used that did anything to help my horribly cracked heels. It was actually one of the only remaining products left after my maniacal purge. It went it and got it and read the label: This salve contained shea butter, beeswax, walnut oil, tea tree oil, aloe vera oil, vitamin E, lavender essential oil and that was all. When I ran out of it, I called the 800 number on the label and found a wonderful retired dentist that had developed this salve to heal her fingertips when they became cracked from working with the clays and plaster used to make dental molds. She was so kind and we had a lovely chat and I asked her if she would send me some more. She told me she had been meaning "to whip up a batch" anyway and that she would be happy to ship me some and I could just send her a check (!!) when I got the package. .....Whip up a batch? I remembered, now that sounds promising. I can whip up a ton of things, why not this?
At this, point I should tell you something about myself: I am a little obsessed with trying to figure out how things were made before industry and big business took over. One of my principal obsessions was how did they make Mr. Bubble prior to the prolific use of sulfates? After I threw everything out, our bubble bath options we limited. What I did find was weak and milky and not very bubbly. But it did smell good. We will get in to that more when I introduce my soaps but my brain just clanked and churned and boiled. It does that. Anyway...I know that almost everything that we buy at the store now was once made at home and if I can make it at home I do.
I wasn’t able to find recipes for anything online that wasn’t a butter or that used junk I didn’t want to use. So off to the bookstore I went where I found what basically amounted to a cook book for organic skin care products. Finally a result.
As it turns out making lotion is essentially mastering the process of the emulsification of melted waxes, butters and oils with heated water and a mineral binder. Sounds easy enough but the reality is that it took me years to be able to "whip up" my own version of what my dentist friend made. Batch after batch of lotion was a disaster: glumpy grainy globs to runny anemic puddles were my rewards as I struggled with the temperatures of the hot oils and water that heat and cool at different rates. It turned out that patience is the driving force in this process. No wonder commercial skin care companies use a different process in mass production. You just can't do it this way. If making handmade lotion is like making hollandaise, then commercial lotions are like making packaged gravy. You wouldn't buy a jar of shelf stable gravy for the very reason that it is shelf stable. Shelf stable lotions are, to me, the same thing.
What's in it that gives it a shelf life of forever? In "organic" lotions, it's called steric acid, and there is nothing, on it's face, wrong with it. Steric acid is the underlying chemical composition of most butters and oils, without, well, the butter or oil. And while it may provide some healthful benefits and has an indefinite shelf life it has been stripped of all the emollient and silky natural ingredients. Just add water and some fragrance and a little coloring, maybe some label candy like aloe or shea butter and you have what comprises most of the alternative commercial lotions.
It has taken me 8 years to learn to craft these creams with anything even remotely approaching consistency.
Since then I have developed, starting with the original recipes found in that book and a lot of trial and error, a whole line of skin care products that I and my family use. Nearly everyone in my immediate circle has used what I make and without exception they have said to me, "Hey MJ, you should sell this stuff". Yeah yeah. Who has time for that?
That time came along when I was able to take an entire year off work to recover from surgery and do a little course-correcting on my career path. What you will see as you proceed is the sum total of that year. Outside of parenting my daughter, launching this love-of-my-life endeavor has been one of the hardest and most rewarding things I have ever done. Apart from this being a fun and rewarding endeavor, I can promise you that you will never have to look up anything in my products. If you don't know what something is or what it does, go to the ingredients page and you'll find it there.
So, I hope you will join me on Unity Road....where the journey to healthy, luxurious and entirely pure skin care products begins. We might have a little fun along the way. This is the beginning of something. I am not certain what, but I have to believe, it will be good.
Thanks so very much for stopping by.
MJ Emery
Creator & Owner