DEAN CURTIS FOR LIVING WELL After researching how to make comforting salves and soaps for herself, Emily Cagle thought she could turn her knowledge into a business.
with nausea. Essential oils are often used as a more natural way to add fragrance to a product, too.
She produces all natural goat milk soaps, bath bombs, pain salves and lotion bars. On every product, Cagle includes her often short list of ingredients. The bath bombs are her best sellers, and people covet the orangesicle cream, peppermint, and the lavender and vanilla.
The bath bombs contain citric acid and baking soda and they fizz when dropped into hot water and release the essential oils.
“With essential oils I can use ingredients to help if you have problems with headaches or something else,” Cagle said.
She crafts her soaps with goat milk because it’s highly hydrating. While she stocks about 15 scents, Cagle can customize any soap by mixing
oils. Many are in the shape of flowers but she plays around with molds throughout the year even creating seasonal soaps like Easter eggs or ones shaped as gifts.
The most hydrating product in her line is her lotion bars which are a combination of beeswax, coconut oil and shea butter.
“It’s a solid bar and you rub you hands on it and can use it again when you need it,” said Cagle. “It soaks right in and gets rid of dry patches. It’s very popular with people who work in the healthcare industry because they wash their hands so much and it dries them out. It’s really quite amazing how quickly it works.”
When she set out to help herself, Cagle never imagined she’d start a small business. It’s been an amazing journey and she continues to learn along the way, she said.
26 Living Well i August/November 2016 CreekBaby
Misty Duffy, a Yellville resident and Knoxville, Arkansas, native, was looking for natural skincare products when she was pregnant.
There are 12 ingredients common in beauty products that pregnant women should avoid, so in 2012 this mom-to-be became a label reader. Duffy spent years working in New York and as a marketing executive for Elizabeth Arden so she knows the beauty industry.
As she scoured labels, Duffy was disheartened because even if they didn’t contain those 12 ingredients, they contained so many others.
“I would look at the back of a bottle and it would have all these ingredients and I thought, ‘Does it really need all these ingredients? Are these just fillers?’ Being from a
beauty industry background, I remember being in meetings and they’d come in with prototypes and we’d put lotion on our hands and say, ‘It should feel silkier, or more like silicone’ and they’d take it back. It shouldn’t be how it feels, it should be about how it helps your skin,” Duffy said.
So she started researching natural remedies and DIY cosmetics, and turned to coconut oil for her own skincare needs. But there was a learning curve as coconut oil can be processed numerous ways which affects the oil and it scent.
By 2013, her baby girl was born and Duffy had developed natural products she used daily. When she left her job with Elizabeth Arden, Duffy’s husband encouraged her to start her own business with the products she’d developed.
“At first I was like ‘no one is going
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