While walking through one of the artisan markets at Art Murmur I stopped at this woman’s table of organic skin care products and I said, “This stuff looks…and smells wonderful. Very cool. Mind if I take your picture for my blog about bay area culture?”

“As long as you make me look like Halle Berry.”

“We’ve already got a Halle Berry, you’re beautiful and we need you.”

“Thank you.”

“You make all this stuff yourself?”

“Yep, all me.”

“How’d you get into it?”

“I started making this stuff about 6 years ago because I really believe in diversity of beauty. You don’t have to be a 6 ft tall eastern european girl to be considered beautiful. So, I stopped being a real estate broker three years ago to do this full time. My goal is to appeal diversity of beauty and also sell effective products. A lot of people want to do their own thing but their products don’t work. I try to make sure everything works. My sister is a physician and she helps with the formulations of everything so that they’re gentle and still effective. I try to have everything be organic. The shea butter is organic from Uganda. Lip balms are all organic. The soaps have organic palm oil that are also orangutan friendly.”

“Orangutan friendly?”

“Organgutan friendly.”

“What does that mean?”

“A lot of palm production takes place where there are a lot of orangutans so some production methods involve slash and burn. They just burn down the habitats of orangutans to make way for their crops but I order from places where they respect and maintain orangutan habitats.”

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