Just like your heart, brain or stomach, your skin is an organ — and it is actually your largest organ, at that! Knowing this, how can we better care for our skin? How can we stop it from overworking or acquiring too much damage? Largely, we can keep our skin healthy through diligent, deliberate care with the right kinds of products.
As a desert dweller, Michelle Rivera saw a need to help people prevent early aging on their skin and help people reverse skin and sun damage.
“We don’t realize how fast our skin is aging or the damage happening to it with the dry heat, lack of humidity, and harsh sun,” Rivera says.
Rivera opened Hippie Girl Natural Products in 2011 and began making natural soaps as an effort to help her community learn to better care for their skin.
The cold process she uses to make the soaps illustrates the natural purity of the product. Rivera starts from scratch with a base lipid, such as olive oil or coconut oil, and turns it into soap.
Next, she simply adds essential oils and herbs to create different scents, each with different moisturizing and healing properties. For example, some soaps include lavender to help relieve stress – and each scent is designed with the customer’s well-being in mind.
It takes about 60 days from the start of the cold process to packaging for Rivera to make a batch of soaps. Some of the scents Rivera uses are staples and can all be found in her shop. However, most of the scents in her shop are seasonal and limited to certain times of the year or certain amounts. So if you see a scent you like, get it before it’s gone! And don’t be afraid to try new ones.
“Whatever the garden gives me is what I make the soaps with,” Rivera says.
Since then, Hippy Girl Natural Products has created and sells an entire line of natural products centered around each customers’ health of mind, body and soul. The store offers everything from lotions and bath bombs to candles and lavender joints for stress and even fulfills custom orders for parties or personal use upon request.
With the success and popularity of Hippy Girl’s natural products, the company is moving completely online to reach more customers. You can access the store and see the variety of products by visiting hippygirlnaturalproducts.com.
“Moving our store online will help us expand our reach to be outside El Paso,” Rivera says. And with such a fantastic line of products, they seem sure to see success nationwide – talk about a strong El Paso business.
