225 Health and Beauty Guide

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Beach Style What to wear, what to pack

Fitness Q&As with Michael Lang Elizabeth Walsh Nachman Randy Roussel and Whitney Vann Go-to recipes for entertaining healthy Hair makeovers you’ll love The no-excuses home workout

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Hill mixes and crafts her products nearly every day in her kitchen.

Natural cosmetics maker Elizabeth Hill says ‘feed your skin’ BY MAGGIE HEYN RICHARDSON PHOTOS BY DON KADAIR

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t Meredith Dixon’s recent Girls’ Night Out, the room was filled with the sound of women laughing, talking and shaking bottles of sea salt. Instructed by natural cosmetics maker Elizabeth Hill of Handmade at Homestead, three dozen women stood around tables covered with the raw materials required to make bath salts. Hill passed around a tray of fragrance vials, including top grabs like lavender, lemongrass-sage and the tropical fruit-scented “Beach.” Next, she offered droplets of natural colorants extracted from turmeric, Moroccan red clay, spinach and other elements that tinted the crystalline salt in pastel shades. Finally, Hill instructed participants to shake their bottles vigorously to evenly distribute the color and fragrance. “The girls loved it,” said Dixon, 27, who helped organize the event for members of a Healing Place Church group. “It was a lot of fun to make something together, and they enjoyed hearing what Elizabeth had to say about natural cosmetics.” Hill’s Tupperware-like spa parties are the latest facet of a two-year business that also includes an online store and a Saturday booth inside the Main Street Market in downtown Baton Rouge—both stocked with her smallbatch, artisan skincare products. Hill founded Handmade at Homestead in 2007, after trading in what she calls an unsatisfying, grueling corporate career in exchange for a personal passion.

Her products are made primarily from natural ingredients—many of them familiar foods. Like a vintage apothecary, she mixes and crafts them nearly every day in the kitchen of her century-old plantation home in West Baton Rouge Parish. As Hill talks to customers at the market or spa parties, the conversation often turns to how she got started making hand-crafted soaps and lotions in the first place. She says it began when her son, Joey Groner, experienced what seemed a dependency on common lip balm. “He had severely dry lips,” says Hill, 46. “And he would go crazy if he couldn’t find his ChapStick.”

But no matter how much ChapStick Joey used, says Hill, his lips were still cracked and raw. Hill thought she could come up with a better remedy, and she began furiously researching natural lip balm recipes. She bought beeswax from the former Baton Rouge health food store, Living Foods, added grapeseed, peppermint and almond oils for moisture and fragrance and poured her formula into unused tubes she found on eBay. Joey tried it—and discovered his mother’s concoction not only relieved the discomfort of chapped lips, it got rid of them. Hill made more lip balm for friends and family, and, like Joey, they gave it high marks. It prompted her to 2010 Health and Beauty

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YOUR BEAUTY dabble in handmade soaps, and she began networking with local craftspeople and in online communities about effective soapmaking techniques. Later, she mastered bath sea salts and shea butter-rich lotions, mixed her own cleaning supplies and developed a mild facial soap that she says has been effective in fighting acne. It’s named PTP, short for its ingredients, peppermint, tea tree and parsley. “I add new things all the time,� says Hill. Among the latest of nearly two dozen products is an English mustard bath, a formula made from salt, powdered mustard and eucalyptus, peppermint, rosemary and wintergreen essential oils. Hill says ground English mustard seed is known to stimulate circulation and draw out toxins. She also created a product she calls “Unbelievable Sugar Scrub,� a natural exfoliant that provides the skin natural

glycolic acid, she says. It’s been featured as a substitute for hand soap at Main Street Market’s public bathrooms. Homestead’s Sugar Scrub is one of Hill’s signature products, not only because of its novelty but also because of how she sources the main ingredient. Hill lives on a functioning 900-acre sugar plantation, and the cane grown on site is processed at the nearby Alma

Sugar Mill. When Hill decided to create a sugar-based scrub, she thought it significant to use sugar that had started off at home. “I asked the processors if I could buy some of my sugar back and they agreed,� she says. Hill says the use of minerals and foods in skin care items might seem old fashioned, but it’s grown in popularity as health-conscious consumers apply the same scrutiny to cosmetics as they do to food. In fact, Hill believes fans of locally grown foods will find kinship in her products. “You think of eating seasonally, and trying to create a diet of local, wholesome foods. You’re skin is an organ, too, and it needs to be fed good things,� she says. “Pumpkin in the fall, papaya in the spring. It’s just a different way of thinking about it.�

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2010 Health and Beauty

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