How to love your skin the East Bay way.

Once upon a time, skin care—all about protection from harsh elements and healing from rashes and wounds—involved bear grease, coconut oil, aloe vera, and honey. Eventually, however, the Europeans developed lead-based whitening creams with some rather unattractive side effects— disfigurement, illness, and death. Today, hundreds of years after this failed attempt to improve on nature, American consumers—mostly women—spend billions of dollars each year protecting, nourishing, and beautifying their skin. But research shows that the mainstream industry’s chemical concoctions may do more harm than good for the health of our body’s largest organ.

Fortunately, the East Bay is home to an impressive group of homegrown innovators, some of whom even mix up natural potions by hand. Redefining the vast world of skin care, these hands-on, stir-the-pot, and switch-on-the-blender folks make safe, high-quality skin-care products like soaps, cleansers, creams, toners, scrubs, lotions, and mists. They’re entrepreneurs, to be sure—but also artists, chemists, and healers.

Sexy skin

“If you want to understand skin care, you have to begin with the skin,” explains Shannon Schroter, founder of Grateful Body, whose West Berkeley space is an alchemist lab, kitchen, and office all in one. Large glass jars filled with blossoms, roots, and leaves line the shelves; brown whirligigs of yarrow root are drying in stainless steel baskets on the counter.

Twenty-five years of studying the healing arts have led Schroter to see the human body in holistic terms. “Most people think of skin like the outside of a car,” he says, “and they think of skin care in terms of waxing and buffing that. But the skin is not a shell. It is a multilayered, dynamic interface between us and the world.” Schroter’s products—including his popular body lotions and the fragrant Aphrodite’s Feast serum—support the skin with what he considers biologically appropriate nutrients, which, he says, penetrate into the bloodstream and nourish the body.

Marie Nadeau, a former chemistry teacher and author of the 2007 beauty guide, The Yoga Facelift, creates Marie Veronique Organics, her all-natural skin-care line, in a small, immaculately clean kitchen near Berkeley’s Fourth Street. “It would benefit people a lot if they stopped thinking of their skin like a sausage casing,” says the 62-year-old entrepreneur, echoing Schroter. “Skin is wonderful and amazing, much like the brain in its complexity.” It protects us against environmental assault, Nadeau says, by producing a barrier of lipids. But as production of these lipids diminishes around age 30, only skin-care products can replenish the essential fatty acids.

Judging by Nadeau’s own flawlessly smooth complexion, it’s easy to believe that concoctions from Marie Veronique Organics really do slow the physical aging process.

“Because we know that what goes on your skin ultimately penetrates your skin and goes into your body, we don’t use toxins, petroleum-based products, nanoparticles, or anything else that’s potentially harmful,” says Nadeau, whose moisturizing face screen, for example, offers natural protection against the complete UVA/UVB spectrum.

Over on bustling College Avenue in Berkeley’s Elmwood district, Susie Wang’s 100% Pure retail store exudes an upbeat Hello Kitty ambiance, displaying an abundance of pastel-colored bottles, jars, and compacts. In addition to skin care, 100% Pure offers a line of hair products as well as all-natural cosmetics made with Wang’s patented fruit-based pigments. The powders, tints, and lipsticks hark back to the days when women darkened their lips and blushed their cheeks with raspberry juice.

Launched in 2005, 100% Pure might never have existed had it not been for a startling mishap. While formulating a new eye cream in a prestigious cosmetics lab some years ago, Wang accidentally knocked over a vial containing a chemical that was to go into the cream—then watched in horror as it eroded the surface of the lab table. Taking a closer look at the chemicals widely used in cosmetics, Wang found that many were associated with cancer, tumors, skin irritation, and other disorders. Further, she learned, commercial body-care products tend to consist primarily of cheap thickeners and emulsifiers, with only a dash of the active ingredients touted on the label.

By contrast, 100% Pure products are based on plant-derived substances (Japanese honeysuckle and grapeseed extract, for example, serve as preservatives), free not only of synthetic preservatives and fragrances, but also of artificial thickeners, emulsifiers, and color. So natural are the scents at the College Avenue shop (headquartered in Oakland, the business also has offices in Napa and Paris), in fact, that if you closed your eyes, you might imagine that you’re in the midst of the fruit aisles at Berkeley Bowl.

Green glamour

Schroter, like other East Bay natural skin-care entrepreneurs, is skeptical of the terms that big companies use to make their products sound wholesome. “Most of the conventional products that claim to be natural are actually ‘cosmoceuticals’ that copy the molecular structure of plants for synthetic replication,” he says. By contrast, Schroter and his East Bay colleagues make a point of fully disclosing a product’s ingredients on labels and in online information. When companies use terms a layperson can understand—frankincense rather than boswellia carteri, for example, or apricot kernel oil rather than prunus armeniaca—label-reading is instructive rather than mystifying.

“Deception, distortion, and distraction are the three D’s that keep consumers robotic,” agrees Manda Heron, CEO of the venerable Berkeley skin-care company, Body Time, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. The Food and Drug Administration has virtually no regulations governing cosmetics, Heron says, and the ubiquitous label “all natural” means little these days. In other words, labeling rules aren’t much stricter than they were back in 1970, when two women—Heron’s mother, Peggy Short, and Short’s sister-in-law, Jane Saunders—launched Body Time in a Berkeley garage.

“Those were the days when consumers either bought drugstore products like Jergens and Pond’s, or they went for the high-end department store cosmetics,” Heron recalls. “These products stripped hair and skin of their natural protective mantle instead of nourishing it and balancing it.” Of course, they also made money for the companies that produced them—something that didn’t especially concern Body Time’s founders, who were, Heron says, “hippies who cared about local living.”

As small-scale rebels, Short and Saunders not only created products that, says Heron, were “‘natural’—whatever that meant in 1970,” but engaged in “the very progressive practice[s] of doing away with packaging, refilling containers, and custom-scenting lotions.” And eventually—perhaps to their surprise—their influence was felt around the world. As Heron tells it, shortly after English entrepreneur Anita Roddick visited Short and Saunders’s store (then known as The Body Shop) in the ’70s, she launched her own body-care business. Like Short and Saunders, Roddick encouraged customers to refill their containers, custom-scented her products—and called her enterprise The Body Shop. In 1987, Roddick purchased the Body Shop name from the sisters-in-law—who adopted Body Time as their new moniker—and expanded her enterprise to over 2,000 franchises worldwide. At her death in 2007, Roddick was one of the wealthiest women in England.

Today, Body Time still sells the traditional products with the familiar black-on-white labels, as well as a botanical line that is eco-certified according to European standards, both online and at four retail shops in the Bay Area. “In the age of 800 numbers, we still respond to customers individually,” Heron points out. “And,” she says, echoing her mother’s trend-bucking tone, “we have stayed independent.”

A similar renegade spirit is alive and well at the Alameda company Lotus Moon, founded eight years ago by Lake Louise Ziwa. “My skin-care philosophy,” Ziwa, 46, tells me over breakfast at her brother’s Guerilla Cafe on Shattuck Avenue in North Berkeley, “is based on respecting the health of people and of the planet.” Scornful of the conventional politics of beauty which, the Stanford-educated entrepreneur says, “encourage[s] women to be fake or meet someone else’s standards,” Ziwa is launching the “Plain Jane” cosmetics line this summer for “women who don’t want the makeup look.”

Like Body Time and 100% Pure, Lotus Moon products are created in labs around the country. Nadeau and Schroter, on the other hand, concoct most of their products on site in Berkeley, sometimes even mixing up a batch of cream or serum as orders arrive. On the opposite end of the natural spectrum, 100% Pure distributes its wares worldwide, and continues to expand the product line. But at 2,000 bottles a day, the company’s production rate is still small potatoes compared to industry giants like L’Oreal or Pond’s.

Berkeley beauty: A pregnant Manda Heron, current CEO of Body Time, sits in front of the company’s original Shattuck Avenue store—then called The Body Shop—in 1972. Heron’s mother and aunt eventually sold the name to English entrepreneur Anita Roddick. Photo courtesy Manda Heron.

Uncommon scents

An emphasis on pleasure links these green cosmetics pioneers to their cousins of sorts, a pair of natural perfume makers working in Berkeley. Mandy Aftel, founder of Aftelier Perfumes and author of the classic 2001 history of perfume, Essence and Alchemy, is a world-renowned perfumer. An artisan who sees herself as “the custodian of a sacred art linked to nature, alchemy, and ritual,” Aftel says her mission is to create fragrances “that are a richly layered experience and transport you out of the ordinary world.” Sitting in her beautiful atelier, in front of dozens of small, meticulously arranged bottles of yellow, red, brown, and green essences arranged on a triptych of polished wooden shelves, she says that she has refused many buy-out offers. “No one could pay me for what I get out of doing my work,” she says. Aftel’s creations are not cheap: the pure ingredients she uses can be very expensive—boronia, derived from the flowers of boronia megastigma, for example, costs upwards of $300 an ounce. But, Aftel notes, her prices reflect the quality of ingredients, not the cost of packaging and marketing, as is usually the case with conventional perfumes.

Alison Cecile Johns, a local musician, interviewed Aftel a few years ago for a KPFA special on the sense of smell, and found herself so intrigued by the similarities between perfume and music that she founded her own natural perfume company—pomegranate, lotus & plum. “There is a lot of crossover between the worlds of scent and sound,” Johns observes. “You can shut your eyes or close your mouth, but scent and sound will touch you whether you want them to or not.”

Johns, whose business is housed in a roomy studio in West Berkeley, wants to create products that make the wearer feel special—sexy from the inside out. “When a woman wears my scent,” Johns says, “she should feel like sitting up a little taller.” But customers aren’t the only ones who get a lift from the sensual creations. Her work on a perfume is finished, Johns says, “when it brings a smile to my face.”

It brings a smile to my face, too, when I hear these innovators talk about beauty as a sense of individual variation, a feeling of confidence, and a state of well-being, rather than the unforgiving ideals so often promoted in our culture. There is something deeply reassuring about a production space that looks more like a kitchen than a chemistry lab, and knowing that these skin-care wizards have personally dreamed up the contents of each vial.

Imagining Schroter and Nadeau at work in their lab-kitchens in West Berkeley brings to mind a Buddhist prayer: “In this food, I see the presence of the entire universe supporting me.” That’s how I feel when I use these skin products and scents—like nature and these passionate East Bay innovators are working on my behalf.

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Christine Schoefer lives in Berkeley. After talking to makers of natural beauty products and trying out their goods, she threw out her drugstore lotions and the expensive tubes and bottles with French names. She wonders if she should have taken them to the toxic dump.

Pristine Potions

100% Pure, 2983 College Ave., Berkeley, (510) 548-8595; 100percentpure.com.

Aftelier Perfumes, (510) 841-2111; aftelier.com.

Body by Melisa, 4414 Piedmont Ave., Ste. 2, Oakland, (510) 655-2639; bodybymelisa.com.

Body Time, 1942 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, (510) 841-5818; 2911 College Ave., Berkeley, (510) 845-2101; 5521 College Ave., Oakland, (510) 547-4116; bodytime.com.

Conscious Skin and Body Care, 2515 Santa Clara Ave., Ste. 103, Alameda, (510) 551-8834; consciousskinandbody.com.

Grateful Body, 1041 Folger Ave., Berkeley, (510) 848-9292; gratefulbody.com.

Lotus Moon, (888) 762-2667, Alameda; smbessentials.com.

Marie Veronique Organics, 1790 5th St., Berkeley, (510) 655-1543; mvorganics.com.

Miracullum Day Spa, 1355 N. Main St., Walnut Creek, (925) 943-6146; miracullum.com.

Pharmaca, 1744 Solano Ave., Berkeley, (510) 527-8929; 5729 College Ave., Oakland, (510) 740-1468; pharmaca.com.

pomegranate, lotus & plum, 2703 7th St., Ste. 271, Berkeley, (510) 485-6634; pomloplum.com.

Whole Foods Market, 3000 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley, (510) 649-1333; 230 Bay Place, Oakland, (510) 834-9800; wholefoodsmarket.com.