How it all began

"Why did you start making skin care products?" people often ask me.
This is usually followed by "How did you learn how to make skin care products?"

Well the reasons are many – but the main reason was because I couldn’t find any products that were good enough to use on my skin – I reacted to pretty much everything, and NOTHING lived up to my standards on being chemical free, cruelty free and environmentally friendly.

When I started Intuitive Skin Nourishment, natural skin care was still an emerging "trend" and greenwashing (marketing non-natural/environmentally friendly products as "Eco") was at a high.

Sadly 12 years later, not much has changed.

Today the market is saturated with "natural" products that really only contain a few extracts, mixed with a heap of synthetic chemicals and preservatives. Even many certified "organic" are far from "natural".

Natural to me means being made from ingredients that are close to how they would be found in nature. Not ingredients that a derived from nature, highly processed and stripped of their nutrients, often just to extract one chemical component of original natural ingredient.

Most of us agree that processed foods are bad for our health – but how many of us consider what processed ingredients do to our skin?

Well its the same - highly processed ingredients make for poor quality & damaging skin care products.

Refined oils and chemically extracted fragrances are still highly processed, regardless of whether they originated in nature, or not.

And as much as we humans like to think we know better than nature – we don’t. We are surrounded by evidence that suggests the more we interfere, the worse we make things – not always, but more often than not.

So for me – when I was looking for products to put on my skin, I couldn’t find many that were what I considered natural. And those that were – didn’t seem to improve the quality of my skin.

One day I decided to stop lamenting the lack of decent skin care products and do something about it.

Which brings me onto "How did you learn?"

Well it turns out, I approached it the same way I like to cook…

Gather some quality ingredients I know something about, and then mix them together and see what happens.

I knew I wanted to use coconut oil – because of its well known skin healing properties.
But the coconut oil had to be the highest quality and unrefined – in other words cold pressed.

While I was researching quality coconut oil suppliers, I learnt about an oil known as Tamanu Oil, which is pressed from the nuts of mangrove trees that grow around the South Pacific Islands.

Tamanu oil has many names – depending on which Island it comes from.
"Tamanu" is the name given to the mangrove tree by the people of Vanuatu (which is where I source mine from).

Tamanu oil has even more skin healing properties than coconut oil and has extensive research to support the claims.

So I decided I would order some along with some coconut oil to see what I could create….
When I mixed them together – magic happened!

And that's how my first product the "Luscious Healing Oil" came about.