Deb Searle, who has always enjoyed experimenting with creating scent profiles from what’s available on her property, grew up on a family farm that was originally located across the street from the Greenwood Lake Middle School on Lakes Road, that included chickens, goats, and many different kinds of plants and flowers. But she learned at a young age that she enjoyed discovering how you can mix certain ingredients together to create a product that was useful as a soap, cleanser, salve, balm, spray, salt, deodorant and more!
“It’s trial and error,” she revealed, “but also over the years you learn the properties of different oils and what they’re better at. Some oils, for example, are better at making a soap; others are better at hydrating skin better; and some are good at making a product bubbly so you need to know all the basics first. There are a lot of ways in which to deliver the different fragrances: some in a bar format (like a bar of soap), some are granules, some are better as lotions, and deodorants, shampoos. When I’m ordering essential, fragrance oils every single company that sells those has an MSDS (material safety data sheet), the certification list that tells you what is best for what they have found. So you can’t put some ingredients into soaps or anything similar, but they’re great for candles and stuff like that.”
Her number one thing is that she makes sure the ingredients are all US based. She has a little container with coffee grinds for people who smell everything and say that there’s no difference because their overloaded sense of smell just shuts down. She started the business around 2011 officially, and it has slowly grown into a regular company. “I was already making products for my family and my sisters and parents, and they’d start to make specific requests for certain products that they liked,” she added.
“I thought my knowledge is vast but when you get into making it and you talk to other makers and take classes here and there (just cause you’re interested like something specific, you begin to ask questions, (like what’s the difference between this and that item) and you find out like you know nothing,” Deb admitted. She’s been like a little sponge, wanting to know as much as possible and has just kept experimenting and doing different things. “For many years it was one of my hobbies and then the hobby started to make a little bit of money and it was starting to absorb more and more of my time to where, you know, it’s like decision time: is it a hobby or is it gonna be a business? So now it’s become a growing business.
The Lakeside Farmers Market [VillageofGreenwoodLake.org/lakeside-farmers-market] is open every Saturday at Winstanley Park on Windermere Ave., from 9AM-1PM, through the end of October, featuring not only a group of stalwart producer, fruits, and prepared product vendors, but also several artisan product companies, like Savvy Sisters Soaps & Apothecary [UniqueHomemadeCreations.com].
Photo credit: Peter Lyons Hall
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