It started with toothpaste.

I’m not a chemist. I’m not an herbalist. I live in Florida and I started making my own personal care products because I kept looking at what I was spending money on and asking: why is this so complicated?

The toothpaste came first. I wanted a fluoride-free option and everything on the shelf was either full of ingredients I didn’t recognize or cost twice what it should. So I looked into what toothpaste actually does — and it turns out baking soda cleans your teeth, coconut oil is antimicrobial, and peppermint makes it taste right. Three ingredients. I made a jar. It worked. That was the beginning.

The deodorant came next because I kept getting hives. I’d switch brands, same result. I started looking at what was in them — aluminum, synthetic fragrance, propylene glycol — and eventually realized my skin was just reacting to the wrong stuff. I spent a long time on the ratio: enough baking soda to actually neutralize odor, not so much that it burns, coconut oil and beeswax to hold it together, arrowroot to keep things dry. I tested it on my own skin for months. No hives. That bar is what I ship.

The moisturizer has the best origin story. I bought a cow. When I rendered the fat I ended up with a lot of beef tallow — more than I knew what to do with. Around that same time, tallow skincare was picking up everywhere, and when I looked into why, it made sense: tallow’s fatty acid profile is close to human sebum. It absorbs instead of sitting on the surface like a petroleum film. So I whipped it, added a little essential oil, and started using it on my face. My skin — which had been wrecked from years of acne and treatments — finally calmed down.

The soap is the newest. I’ve been making cold process soap for about a month. My first batch is currently curing — cold process requires 4 to 6 weeks before it’s ready to use, and I won’t ship it early. When it’s done, it’ll be four ingredients: coconut oil, reverse osmosis water, lye, and essential oils. The lye fully converts during saponification — none of it ends up in the bar. I’ll update this page when it ships.

The whole thing is called À La Natural because that’s what it is. No filler ingredients, no marketing language on the label, no “proprietary blend” hiding something. Just what’s in it, and why it’s there.