My guests today are Diana Kaye and James Hahn, husband and wife, and co-founders of their USDA certified organic business Terressentials. They own a small organic farm in lovely Middletown Valley, Maryland and have operated their organic herbal personal care products business there since 1996. Terressentials was originally started in Virginia in 1992. It grew out of their search for chemical-free products after Diana’s personal experience with cancer and chemotherapy in 1988. Prior to Diana’s cancer, they were involved in commercial architecture in Washington DC. Diana and James are proud to be an authentic USDA certified organic and Fair Made USA business. They are obsessive organic researchers and artisan handcrafters of more than one hundred USDA certified organic gourmet personal care products that they offer through their two organic stores in Frederick County, Maryland, through a network of select retail partners across the US, and to customers around the world via their informative web site. Their products also caught the eye of the producers of the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs show. The show’s host, Mike Rowe, “helped” them make a batch of their very popular Pure Earth Hair Wash, which was enormously funny and has been aired repeatedly on the Discovery Channel around the globe. Their Pure Earth Hair Wash was just named the “Best of Washington DC” by the Washington Post. www.terressentials.com
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH DIANA KAYE & JAMES HAHN
- GMOs in Personal Care Products
- Toxics in Essential Oils?
- How to Restore Your “Virgin Hair”
- How to Read a Label on Organic Personal Care Products
- More About “Organic”: Politics and the Regulation of Marketplace Distribution
- The Challenges of Achieving Organic Certification
- What Organic Means — From the Experience of Being Organic Farmers
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Why One Couple Decided to Get An Organic Farm and Make USDA Certified Organic Gourmet Personal Care Products
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Diana Kaye and James Hahn
Date of Broadcast: June 11, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It is – what’s the date today? The 10th or 11th. I haven’t looked at the calendar of June 2014. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida where we’re having a lovely summer day.
I have a new mic today, a new microphone and I love it. But I’m still getting used to it. The old microphone sometimes – yesterday, we had a technical difficulty and couldn’t do the show at all because my old mic was having a problem. It’s been having problems off and on. So I think this one is going to be better. I’m still getting used to like how far I need to speak away from it or close to it and all those things, but we’ll get used to it. We’ll get used to it.
Okay! So today, we’re going to be talking about USDA certified organic gourmet personal care products. These personal care products had been around for quite a while. One of the first organic personal care products that there were. I’ve known about this company, I’ve been recommending it for many years. They’ve been doing this almost as long as I’ve been writing about it.
They have their own organic farm. They produce more than a hundred of these gourmet products. They’ve been on television, the Discovery Channel’s DEBRA: show. The host, Mike Rowe, helped them make a batch of their very popular Pure Earth Hairwash, which we’re going to be talking about later. It’s actually a dirty thing. It’s made out of mud, but it gets your hair really clean.
So welcome to my guests, Diana Kaye and James Hahn from Terressentials. Hi, Diana and James.
Diana Kaye: Hi, Debra. I’ve had a little bit of a technical glitch here and I deeply apologize. I haven’t been able to get – we had a little, minor crisis that James has had to attend to. He’s going to try to join us, but he’s not on the line right now. I’m really, really sorry about that.
DEBRA: It’s totally fine. Things happen. This is live radio. Sometimes, we don’t have guests at all. Sometimes, I can’t show up like yesterday. I didn’t have a microphone. So it’s totally fine. We’ll start with you.
Diana Kaye: Sure, no problem.
DEBRA: Okay. So Diana, tell us you are one of the pioneers in organic personal care products. So tell us, how did you get interested in this?
Diana Kaye: It really goes back to 1989. A year before that, I completed a radical course of chemotherapy that really, really played havoc with my immune system and caused me to become so reactive to so many things that has been around me all of my life that my partner and I, James were trying to figure out why I had become so reactive. This was not an expected side effect when thinking about therapy.
Our research showed us that first of all, the cancer I had, non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma has been linked in numerous studies to chemical exposures. So that was quite an eye-opening experience to learn about that. And then to find out that a lot of the chemicals in products that we had been using were considered by our County Municipal Waste Authority as hazardous waste!
DEBRA: Hazardous waste, yeah.
Diana Kaye: It was quite disturbing. We were trying to clean up our lives. In fact, your books were of great help to us back then and some several others.
DEBRA: thank you.
Diana Kaye: We went to our kitchen, the garage, got a big box of products, put it out for the trash people one evening and then the next morning, I went out to get the paper and the box was on my doormat, on my welcome mat. It was a note from the trash people saying that this was hazardous waste and had to go to a special hazardous waste facility. So yeah, that was really a scream.
And so, we learned. We began to question what these ingredients were. When we didn’t know how to pronounce something – and this was all pre-Internet, so…
DEBRA: I remember those days.
Diana Kaye: Yeah, yeah! So it was books. We live really close to DC in Arlington, Virginia so we spent a lot of time at the Library of Congress and the university libraries reading textbooks trying to understand what these ingredients were that we could not pronounce.
And so we learned a lot about chemical processing, chemical manufacturing. We read patents. We read industry textbooks. It’s safe to say that what we found out shocked us. Ingredients that were in (and still are) in products that are labeled ‘natural’ are manufactured in industrial chemical facilities using petrochemical reactive agents, in factories that are regulated by the EPA because of their air, their water and ground pollution. And these are ingredients that people call ‘natural’?
DEBRA: Yes.
Diana Kaye: We have kind of a different definition of that. If I can buy feeds for something and plant it in the garden or it actually is part of the soil, to me, that’s natural.
DEBRA: I completely agree, I completely agree. I know that when I first started writing about this, so much has changed in the last 30+ years since I started. But when I first started writing about it, I was looking at, “Well, here’s all these toxic things. And then here’s the natural products” and the natural products seem to be more natural. A lot of them had ingredients like – they would say sodium-something, lauryl-something and in parenthesis, it would say ‘coconut oil’.
It took me actually a lot of research and a lot of time to learn that these natural ingredients aren’t. I’m sure that you and I will talk about this more in the course of this show, that these natural ingredients are actually not natural. They are natural to the degree that instead of being made from petrochemicals, that the original material is a renewable resource like a coconut, for example.
But then it goes through the same industrial process. That’s not the same thing as just taking a coconut and rubbing it on your skin or whatever.
Diana Kaye: Yes, exactly.
DEBRA: Yeah! And so we have this word ‘natural’, which kind of makes us think it’s okay, but what is allowed to be within the realm of natural is so different from one end of the spectrum to the other. We’ll talk about that more, but I want to hear more about your story.
So you did all these research like I did (we were both doing it in the same period of time in those libraries, looking those things up). And then what decisions did you make out of that?
Diana Kaye: Well, it’s pretty safe to say that after doing considerable amount of research for two years, three years, we found that we had fewer and fewer off-the-shelf option for conventional products to use to clean out, to clean our bodies, to take care of our pets, to take care of our yard and garden.
And we searched the world, by the way. At one point, we were talking to a holistic doctor in Australia to have him actually produce soap for us because we were so disillusioned with what was available here in the States. We talked to some folks in Germany. We were bringing some of their products over.
It was very expensive, I have to tell you, to bring products from Australia and from Europe. And at the time, I was also involved with numerous support group, chemical sensitivity groups, a cancer support group and people that we were talking to who were the people that were like us who were very persistent researchers or were not willing to accept what was being told to them because they could read labels and they’re looking at these ingredients the same as we were.
And so we were sharing information. We were doing research. We were successful in finding some things and people said, “Well, share it with us!” Here we are in a major metropolitan city or area, the Washington D.C. metro area and there are all these people who couldn’t find products that they felt comfortable using. We realized that there was a large gap back then. There was an area in the marketplace that just didn’t have the solution.
So one thing led to another. We first started producing just a mail order catalog – again, pre-Internet. There weren’t websites back then. And so, we put a lot of books in there, one very excellent book and of course, we had some of your books, we had several others, we added another book called The Truth About Where You Live, which was published quite a while ago and it’s still highly relevant. It took every county in the United States and listed all the toxic sources of pollution from underground storage tanks of petroleum…
DEBRA: I think I remember that. We actually need to go to break. I’m so busy listening to you. This is all so interesting that I forgot to look at the clock.
Diana Kaye: Uh-oh.
DEBRA: So we need to go to break, but we’ll be right back.
Diana Kaye: Sure.
DEBRA: This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and I’m talking with Diana Kaye and later, we’ll have her husband, James Hahn on as well from Terressentials. That’s Terressentials.com. We’re talking about personal care products, al the toxic stuff in them and what Diana and James are doing to give us safer products. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Diana Kaye and her husband, James Hahn who will be on shortly after he handles his emergency. They have a business of USDA certified organic gourmet personal care product called Terressentials. That’s at Terressentials.com.
So Diana, I would just like to say something before we go on with what you have to say. I want to say something that came out this morning in an email that somebody sent to me. It was an article about people with MCS, multiple chemical sensitivities. It had a lot of photos of people living in dire straits who had this condition.
It was describing the illness in a way that I had never really noticed this before, what I’m about to say. It describes the illness in a way like even the name, when I first heard about those and went through this myself, it was called ‘environmental illness’. It’s an illness about the environment. Now, it’s called ‘multiple chemical sensitivities’ or MCS.
That states that the person who is being affected, that they are somehow sensitive to these chemicals. They’re just sensitive to chemicals, “there must be something wrong with them.”
But in fact, what’s happening is that people who are suffering from this are being poisoned and it’s not being acknowledged as a poisoning because even the name is – well, here’s this group of people who are extraordinarily sensitive to otherwise not dangerous things. That’s the way it’s presented. That’s even the way it’s presented by people with MCS who write these articles.
I would like people to understand that multiple chemical sensitivity, it’s difficult to get this accepted as an illness because people keep looking at the people who are being affected and saying, “Well, this doesn’t make sense as an illness.” Well, it makes sense as a poisoning.
And it’s not just MCS. MCS is just a little, tiny corner of this great, big picture of all these illnesses that are now associated with toxic chemicals – cancer, diabetes, infertility, heart problems.
I say this a lot, but I’m going to say it again because it needs to be said over and over and over. When I was researching my most recent book, Toxic-Free, I went and looked at the literature again and I had as my hypotheses that toxic chemicals were affecting every single part of your body. They could be at the root of every single illness, any symptom and I found the science to back that up, that now, you can go online, you could look up any illness that you may be having, even down to things that we can’t even perceive like changes in our DNA. Toxic chemicals in consumer products we are using every day are affecting every single one of those things. And yet people don’t look at it as a poisoning.
There! [inaudible 00:17:23]
Diana Kaye: We’ve been doing the exact same research for the past 27 years. I reached the same conclusion and I too have the data to back it up.
My concern – and I’ll add another illness in there or category of illnesses, neurological disorders.
DEBRA: Absolutely!
Diana Kaye: It’s really troubling to me because neurological disorders aren’t just the really obvious things like Parkinson’s Disease (which has been attributed to pesticides use), also things like migraine, developmental disorders including autism, progressiveness, violent behavior, apathy, lethargy.
And then you did mention metabolic disorders like diabetes, but let’s take it a step further, neurological disorders that involve the hypothalamus, which regulates the body’s ability to feel hunger or to feel satisfied. The list goes on and on and on.
We’ve always had these concerns because in toxicology, the previous models for exposure used to be – and this is, again, when I started 25 years ago or so, ingestion was your number source of toxic exposure. But in the past 10 years, that’s been rearranged. It used to be ingestion, inhalation, skin absorption. And now, it’s inhalation, skin absorption in second and ingestion third.
DEBRA: Exactly!
Diana Kaye: So I’m concerned because in our business over the years with having the catalog, the website and two retail shops, we meet a lot of people. I’ve spoken first hand face-to-face to people who think, “Oh, I buy organic food sometimes, so I’m okay.” And then I ask them, “Well, do you drink the water?”
I’m concerned about our water ways. I think that probably that’s our mission here at Terressentials, to raise awareness about the chemicals that people buy that are manufactured in industrial, chemical factories that pollute our water.
And then (this is something people have a hard time getting their heads around) is the fact that we’re part of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed here in Maryland. There are about 14 million people based on the previous census that live in the watershed area. The bay has been so unclean, so unhealthy for so many years that Congress actually mandated a federal clean-up policy, which Maryland, Virginia and all the watershed states failed.
It worries me now that it seems like the public’s exposure here to what the root causes are of the problems in the bay are always being tacked back to a couple of farmers. Now, granted, there is run-off, but that’s really not the biggest problem.
I’m going to go back years back to a very excellent researcher at the EPA, a scientist called Christian Daughton who, again, more than 25 years ago began researching what is in our waterways. He published several reports, written articles, scientific articles about his concerns.
One of the most outstanding quotes (and I’m going to do this to the best of my recollection here) that he stated in one of his articles was his concern that neurological change were occurring in the population, but they were going to occur so slowly over time that these neurological changes would be accepted as “normal”.
DEBRA: We need to go to break. When we come back, we’re going to talk about that some more. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Diana Kaye. And coming up, hopefully, her husband, James Hahn will be joining us. They have a business called Terressentials, which has USDA certified organic gourmet personal care products, Terressentials.com. We will be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Diana Kaye and maybe her husband might be joining us. She’s from Terressentials and they make USDA certified organic gourmet personal care products.
Diana, say now again what you said right before the break.
Diana Kaye: In terms of our concern about the pharmaceuticals and the personal care product ingredients in the water and the EPA scientist?
DEBRA: Yeah, what he said. Quote him again.
Diana Kaye: Yeah, I actually pulled up his article, which is highly readable. There’s an abstract. People can find it online. The title of this special report – okay, it was published December 1999. This is how long this issue has been known and this was the report. The research had been going on for years prior to this. The title is ‘Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products in the Environment: Agents of Subtle Change’. The first author listed is Christian Daughton who I’ve spoken to in the past and he had a co-author, Thomas A. Ternes.
Again, this is a long article and I don’t have the quote in front of me, but generally, what he’s saying here is that there’s so many chemicals in our waterways and many of them cause neurological problems and that we are already seeing these changes in humans. His concern was that – and again, I’m going to paraphrase what he said as a quote in the report. His concern was that these neurological changes had been happening in humans slowly over time. They’ve been happening so slowly (which is why he calls them ‘agents of subtle change’) that the population, society is considering these or beginning to accept neurological changes as normal.
That worries me. We’ve been seeing a rise in – and I don’t believe it’s just in better detection of autism, spectral disorders. It’s frightening to me that I keep reading about these aggressive incidents. I’m sure that some of that has to do with the Internet and more widespread reporting, but it just seems like more and more of this is happening in children.
And again, a neurological change is apathy, lethargy.
DEBRA: Yes, it does.
Diana Kaye: And you mentioned earlier your concern about people labeling MCS, ‘multiple chemical sensitivities’, thereby trying to say that, “Oh, it’s a victim. This is just a person that’s extremely sensitive,” but I agree with you, this is a concern that we have about chemicals poisoning people.
This is why because, again, going back to toxicology issues and forces of chemical exposure, we think that it’s going to be merely impossible to regulate – and what I mean by ‘regulate’ is to filter the air that you breathe every single day unless you live in a bubble.
But the EPA has said in years passed that you can control what you bring into your home, which is a source of chemical emissions, whether it be furniture, a personal care product, a household product, these – and I think, Debra, you and I are both aware of this and maybe the public isn’t so much – volatile organic compounds. We don’t mean ‘organic’ in the good sense of the word.
DEBRA: No, no.
Diana Kaye: We’re talking about organic chemistry here. This is a worry that I have with people who do, again – and you mentioned writers who say they’re chemical sensitive, it seems like their whole focus is on fragrance rather than all the other many chemicals, some of which can cause bigger problems, long-term problems because of their build up in the body. With fragrance, a lot of times, it does cause problems and I totally agree and those are often immediate reaction.
We’re concerned about the long-terms effects. I’m not talking maybe even 20 years, maybe just a year or so of absorbing these chemicals into your body every day.
DEBRA: And having them build up.
Diana Kaye: …right, right! And causing all these interference with all of the systems in your body and a breakdown, so disease occurs or shall we say poisoning. I think one of the big issues – I like to paint a picture for the public to try to understand this.
For example, you buy a bottle of body lotion. Ooh, a nice, big bottle. You got it from your friendly health food store or wherever. It’s labeled ‘natural’ or it might even be labeled ‘organic’ (and that’s a whole other topic), but this product has a host of ingredients that the normal person could not pronounce.
And yet a lot of people accept that and I wonder if that’s part of the neurological agent of subtle change, apathy or lethargy, not investigating what you’re actually putting into your body.
But here’s the picture. You have this bottle of body lotion, a big bottle. You got the 12 oz. size or 16 oz. because it was at a really great reduced price. You put that body lotion on and wow! It absorbs quickly. You like that.
And yet when the bottle of body lotion is empty, where did all of the lotion go?
DEBRA: In your body!
Diana Kaye: Hello? Yeah! People just never make this connection. And then we try to draw the next picture, which is you’re buying a bottle that says it’s all natural and it’s foamy or bubbly and it’s got three or four different detergents and foam boosters in it. But it’s all natural.
You take it home and you use it in your shower and you bubble and scrub and foam up and rinse… and rinse and rinse. Where does it all go? It ends up in our waterway.
DEBRA: Yes.
Diana Kaye: People don’t understand water treatment facilities. They’ve never researched them, so they don’t understand that water treatment really is a series of screens – seriously, fill screens, metal screens that filter sediments (i.e. sewage sludge, a.k.a. sewage sludge). And then what passes through is the water with all the chemicals that you used in your house and your garage. Anything that goes down the drain in your house ends up in the water.
And then what water treatment do in the vast majority of communities in this country is adding chemicals to the water. You precipitate out or cause flocculation of some chemicals and then also adding in chloramines as a disinfectant to kill the bacteria from the messy, poopy stuff that’s in the water. And that’s the recycled water that everyone gets.
It’s also sometimes drawn from community rivers. I know in our community, some of our water is drawn from the Potomac River (not mine, we’re on a well up here). But we’re concerned about that and that is why we’re trying to explain to people that there is a big difference between natural and organic.
And in addition, just one more thing to add, many of these chemicals, petrochemicals, that is, that have toxic issues are what’s called lipophilic; lipo- meaning ‘fat’, -philic is attractive. So in other words, these are chemicals that are actually attracted to fat molecules. So once they penetrate your skin, many of the migrate to the fat because of their affinity for fat and they’re stored there.
DEBRA: And we need to go to break again.
Diana Kaye: Uh-oh.
DEBRA: It goes by really fast, huh?
Diana Kaye: It does.
DEBRA: My guest today is Diana Kaye. She’s from Terressentials and they make USDA certified organic gourmet personal care products. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’ll be right back and talk about this subject more.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Diana Kaye from Terressentials. And Diana, before we go on, I just want to point out, we just had a commercial about a water filter that will remove pharmaceuticals and all those toxic chemicals that we’ve been talking about in your waterways. The reason that I really make a big deal about this water filters is because of all the things that you are saying that get into our water and those toxic chemicals that are not removed.
I just want to say this again about this whole cycle of consumers using the toxic chemicals in their homes, they go down the drain, they go down in their waterways, they do not get removed by the water treatment company. And all those toxic chemicals that we’re using and polluting the indoor air come back to us in our tap water.
So everybody, I just think a water filter is needed in every home, absolutely every home.
And earlier, you were talking about how the EPA says that we do have control over what we bring into our homes. Well, we do. But as soon as we walk out our doors, we’re still being exposed to all those toxic chemicals.
So we’re living in a world that’s dangerous right now. It’s dangerous to our health. We can see that in the statistics of increased – even in my lifetime, the incidence of disease has increased and the ages of children are getting lower and lower. They’re getting diseases now and conditions that only adults used to get and the numbers are higher. And that’s just happened in my lifetime.
So yes, we need to do everything that we can do to reduce the amount of toxic chemicals we use in our home and that make a significant difference. We can great improve our health by doing that and also, by removing toxic residues from our bodies. But when we go out the door, we still are being exposed to toxic chemicals from car exhaust and other people’s buildings and public buildings, in restaurants.
In all these places out in the world, they’re still there. We need to be keeping that in mind and looking at how are we going to create together a world where you don’t have to be concerned about toxic chemicals because they’re just not there.
Diana Kaye: That’s a lovely dream to hold onto.
DEBRA: It’s my goal. It’s my goal.
Diana Kaye: I know! Mine too.
DEBRA: Yeah, recognizing that that’s not where we are now, but recognizing that if we all work together, it’s something that could be achieved.
Diana Kaye: Absolutely! That’s why we spend – and I’m sure, Debra, you do the same thing with so much education. We’ve invested so much researching, writing articles, doing community talks, talking to people even one-on-one, doing whatever we can to raise awareness about – this is my feeling about this. I think we need to get people to understand where things come from, that they don’t just magically appear on a shelf, that there’s a process that’s involved. And unfortunately, with food and body care products (especially body care products), the processing itself can result in so many harmful chemicals that hurt our air and our water.
I have great concern. I’m an animal lover. Forget the animal testing in the labs. That’s being covered, but I have always been concerned about the wildlife that has to swim in the water, live in the water, drink the water that we have so polluted. So we’ve been trying to just get people to hello? First of all, read your label. Read your label.
‘Natural’ isn’t good enough. If you’re talking about a product, for instance, a little baby butt balm and it says all natural, but it’s not organic, it consist oils, fat and maybe beeswax, none of which are organic, this is the product where the toxic chemicals that were sprayed on those plants, which are lipophilic (they’re attracted to the fat), they’re going to concentrate in those oil.
If the beeswax is not organic and it comes from conventional agriculture area where chemicals are sprayed, again, because it’s a fatty substance, these chemicals are going to concentrate in that natural beeswax.
So the next step is organic and legitimate organic. Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of enforcement in that area. There are a lot of products that are labeled ‘natural’, which really is meaningless unfortunately. Even ‘organic’ now that are not certified, that contains a host of different chemicals and non-organic ingredients.
That’s the first step that people can do to protect themselves because again, referring back to the toxicological models of chemical exposure, we have to be concerned about inhalation, number one, breathing and number two, skin absorption.
If you think about it, people bathe. They take a shower. Some people, twice a day, those people who work out. You wash your hands hopefully eight to ten times a day. And the curious thing is when our skin is wet, it becomes five times more absorptive than when it’s dry.
DEBRA: I didn’t know that. Oh, I’m so glad that you said that because most people, this makes a huge difference because even all the things that get put in beauty kind of soaps, all the colorants and the fragrances and all those additives and everything and then you wash your hands or you put it on the shower, you’re just putting all those chemicals in your body and your skin is all opened and absorbing those more than even if you were not taking a shower. Wow! Wow, wow, wow.
So Diana, I hope you’ll come back again because there’s so much that we can talk about, but we only have about five minutes left of this show and I want to make sure that we talk about your products. So tell us about Terressentals and what you’re doing that is so different from what we’ve been talking about.
Diana Kaye: Sure! I’d be happy to. First, I’d like to say that with my experience and researching, I don’t feel comfortable with processed ingredients. I’ve been through the ringer. Having had cancer at a very young age, having developed [inaudible 00:45:36] ‘sensitivities’ or shall we say awareness of my reactions to the chemical poisoning. I feel comfortable about saying…
DEBRA: I like that, ‘my awareness of my reaction to the chemical poisoning’. Thank you.
Diana Kaye: Well, it’s what it is, right?
DEBRA: It is what it is, it is.
Diana Kaye: I try to get through to people about that. Just understand that once you inhale that chemical and you realize that your olfactory nerve endings are being burned, that’s what’s causing you the pain in your head through the top of your nasal cavity, this is a physical pain that we’re being exposed to.
And so I’m trying to get people like you are to understand that this is a poisoning. So for me, when I bathe, when I moisturize my skin, which is rapidly changing as I age, I want to make sure that what I’m rubbing into my body, I would feel comfortable eating.
And I’ve actually done that. I have proven my point on several occasions. I’ve actually eaten our products. I’ve had a little [inaudible 00:46:49] of lotion, which I have drunk. I ate some of our body creams in Washington D.C. at the National Organic Standards Board’s meeting, on television for ABC because the point is if you’re rubbing it onto your skin, you are ingesting it.
DEBRA: You are.
Diana Kaye: Not everything is through your mouth. So we’ve created over the years – I love to call them ‘gourmet’ because they smell delicious. We have body oils and creams where every single ingredient is organic. Many of them are the same ingredients that are used in food products, organic orange oil, lemon oil, peppermint oil, organic vanilla oil, coconut oil, coconut butter, sunflower oil, things that are really wholesome and healthy and were grown organically with certification.
We go through a certification process. We have to document everything that goes into your product, we have to document what we buy against what we say that we sell. So we have to account for every drop of organic material. We do have an inspection. It is a lot of work, a tremendous amount of effort and time and expense to document this year around.
And I’m happy to do it. It is a big headache, but this is what separates us. This is how I can tell people, “This is what we’re doing versus what everybody else says that they’re doing.” We’re authentic. It’s my life. I live, I breathe organically. I try to teach people about edible landscaping to bring it all home, to get people to understand where things come from.
And in our case, we’re a small artisan producer. I often like to give people the idea that we’re almost like a gourmet bakery. We make things in small batches fresh and we ship things directly to our customers and to a handful of stores so that they know when they’re getting a product.
And when you open one of our products, you can smell the difference. It’s in your face. I mean, these are fresh, real ingredients. There’s nothing weird or synthetic about them. They smell delightful, delicious and lovely. They feel good.
And do they work? Yes! Our clay hair washes are so amazing. It’s this gift from Mother Earth that absorbs dirt and oil from your hair. It doesn’t strip it and it binds this excess oil and dirt into itself and then carries it down the drain. And when it goes into the water, it’s dirt. It’s amazing that this is something that just comes right out of our planet that doesn’t require processing other than just grinding the rocks of the clay into a powder to make it easy to use.
DEBRA: Okay, I need to stop you right there because in about ten seconds, the music is going to come on and we’re going to be at the end of the show. So, I need to just thank you so much and say where people can go to your website, Terressentials.com. We’ll continue this conversation on another show. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You can find out more at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Be well!
