You might recall a children’s story entitled The Little Engine That Could, about a little steam engine that decides to pull a train over a steep mountain that every other big engine had given up on. As he’s puffing up the mountain, he keeps saying to himself, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can . . . ,” and then when he comes over the peak and is on his way down, he’s crying, “I knew I could! I knew I could!”
This is one of those kind of stories.
If you’re shopping in a natural or organic retail outlet in Colorado or New Mexico, or if you happen to search for “organic cosmetics” on the Web, you will most likely come across a line of facial products from a company called Lily Organics. Their line includes cleansers, toners, moisturizers and more, and they are made from 100 percent naturally grown organic ingredients such as comfrey, lilac, calendula, yarrow and crab apples. Their products are officially certified USDA Organic—not an easy certification to get—and in fact they are the only USDA Certified Organic skin-care company to harvest and produce their own products.
Between their market presence and the fact that they’ve been around since 1986, you might think Lily Organics is a pretty substantial company with lots of employees and a good-sized production facility. Well, just to throw in one more analogy from yet another children’s story, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” For in this case, if you do happen to pull aside that curtain, you won’t see a man, but you will see Lily, along with her tractor, her farm and her tiny little production facility—and little else!
“I’m the head farm laborer,” Lily explained to Organic Connections “My boyfriend helps me and my son helps once in a while, but that’s pretty much it.”
In this day and age in which megacorporations have come to rule the worldwide economic scene, Lily’s story of triumph—both personally and business-wise—is quite refreshing. It began during Lily’s teenage years. “It started when I was 14,” Lily recounted. “I had severe cyst acne; those are the really big ones that hurt to the touch. My parents couldn’t afford to buy the medication that the dermatologists recommended, which turned out to be something I didn’t want to take anyway—an antibiotic that turns your teeth yellow.”
Lily suffered for 10 years with the acne and went through three dermabrasions (a painful medical procedure in which a layer of skin is basically sanded off) before she decided to turn her back on what was obviously ineffective. She bought every book available on skin care and attended the Colorado Herbal College in Boulder, Colorado. She made her own applesauce masks, utilized witch hazel and drank spirulina, wheatgrass, alfalfa, brewer's yeast and apple juice.
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Soon, Lily’s acne was fully handled—but she had become so knowledgeable with her ingredients that she didn’t want to stop. “I was having fun with herbs, making pineapple astringents, honey and papaya masks, and putting almond, primrose and kukui oil in my hair,” she explained. “One herbal moisturizer I made was light and oil free with the benefit of nineteen different healing herbs. I was so enthusiastic about it, I considered marketing it.”
And, after some encouragement from her sister and mother, she started Lily Organics and has never looked back. A truly “seed-to-shelf” operation, all the ingredients are grown on the Lily Organics farm, picked by Lily and what helpers she has, and made into products right there. “We actually make them up fresh every week,” Lily said. “So, for example, Whole Foods Market calls us Thursday morning, and we make up the products every Thursday and ship them out every Friday.”
Lily comes by her farming skill naturally. Her father was an apple farmer, and her family history of farming stretches back seven generations, to before the American Revolution. Perhaps it’s time we revived at least some of the ways commerce was done back then—when people like Lily took pure, natural ingredients, made them into products and sold them at the market. Let’s hope that Lily’s story foreshadows a better, more natural future for us all.
For more information on Lily Organics, or to find their products, visit their website at www.lilyorganics.com.
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