The Blender and the Witch: The First Formulation

Dear Rosies,

People sometimes ask how Rosebud began. It started in the kitchen.

My husband was very ill, and we were learning everything we could about what we put in and on our bodies, and how to lower the toxin load. The Environmental Working Group's cosmetics database opened my eyes to the fact that most of the products made for our tenderest skin were full of body offenders, and that skin absorbs up to ten times more than skin anywhere else on the body. What touches it, enters the body, if the molecule size is right.

In the days I was formulating, I went looking for herbal wisdom, for what women had used for generations. We consulted Chinese medicine, South American plant traditions, the white witch wisdom of Northern Europe. I traveled to Peru and Ecuador and sat with medicine women, asking what they used for lubrication, for tone, for post partum, for menopause symptoms, for arousal, for healing. A short list of plants emerged, and I started mixing — creams at first, then a dense balm that holds its shape until it meets body heat and melts into slip.

I also surveyed 3,000 women about their intimate lives. What I found stayed with me: these concerns touched 75% of women over fifty and 30% of women under. Almost no one was serving them with care and beauty, only with pathology and quick fixes.

When I brought my kitchen recipe to a chemist who specializes in clean formulation, he smiled and told me I'd made a cookie recipe, not a formula. Beautiful ingredients, but it wouldn't hold. So we started again, properly: a brief built on real needs, the plants I wouldn't compromise on, round after round of refinement. No synthetic perfume, ever — only the natural aroma of the plants themselves. Then testing with women, with OB-GYNs, with labs.

The first finished product shipped to 200 women who'd raised their hands for samples. We were on the road. We still are — same plants, same reverence, same question we started with: what if this part of you was cared for like it mattered?  We were so happy to be picked up right away by pioneering retailer The Detox Market, which has a super stringent clean beauty buying policy. 

Learn about the plants in Honor, and what they do for the vulva, vagina, and the skin in general.

Because it does.

With love, Christine