I started my “natural skin care journey” shortly after my son was born. One of the first things I noticed was I could NOT use mainstream products on his skin, this included baby bottom balm, shampoo, soap, baby lotion. They all contained ingredients that caused skin reactions on his tender baby skin. The worse part was his constant nappy rash that no product I used would fix!
Seeing the constant redness and weeping sores, I felt beside myself with grief because I couldn’t comfort or mend my baby. I kept his nappy off as much as possible (which isn’t very possible with a newborn) to air out the area, yet as soon as the nappy was on the red rash and sores flared up. He was constantly crying and miserable and I was feeling like the world’s worst parent.
My journey lead me to visiting shops and reading what ingredients were in the products and going home to research those ingredients and this is where I found that, even in baby care products, the chemical ingredients used were hazardous and known skin irritants! How were these ingredients allowed to be added to skin care products? Let alone baby care products? And why was the hospital giving out ‘goodie bags’ that contained these hazardous products? I couldn’t fathom it.
Worse still, there was so little (I found nothing) on the market that didn’t contain harsh ingredients.
This is where and why I started JOLI Natural Skin Care in 2005. I wanted desperately to have safe, gentle products I could use on my newborn baby’s skin.
Finding out that Soothing Salve worked as a nappy rash cream was an accidental bonus! Originally I’d been making a nappy rash cream that I used on my baby and it worked well, certainly better than anything I’d been purchasing from the shops. However, we went camping once and I forgot the nappy rash cream (or we ran out?). Within days the rash was back, along with the weeping sores. At least I could let him get around in nature without a nappy on, yet night time was an issue. Out of sheer desperation I used Soothing Salve on him (originally brought to tackle mozzie bites) and it worked SO WELL! Instantly soothing of redness and discomfort, remarkably soothed by next nappy change, with the rash being all but gone by the time we were heading home. I knew I was onto something!!!!
From here my skin care journey grew, my knowledge of hazardous ingredients grew, the product range grew (from Rich Cream Moisturiser and nappy rash cream). I began making more and more products my children could use. Bath time became fun instead of boring, dull and potentially harmful.
It was also around this time that I also started to realise the strange rash I was getting (perioral dermatitis) was caused by overexposure to ingredients in my mainstream moisturiser (a brand [Oil of Ulan] I’d been using since I was 14). Suddenly every time I moisturised I got this strange flare up or weeping, cracked sores around my nose, that spread down over my chin.
The photos of me after having given birth to my baby were horrendous and I was so depressed that I looked SO BAD in my first photos of me with my beautiful baby boy.
