Thriving in the ‘Ham with Place-Based Skincare

Good Graces

WRITTEN BY KRISTEN BOEHM | PHOTOS COURTESY OF GOOD GRACES

IF YOU’VE BEEN shopping the local makers scene for natural skincare over the last few years, you’ve probably seen Good Graces. It was founded in 2019 by Saragrace Wyckoff, who runs her business on three tenets: education, sustainability, and collaboration.

Wyckoff herself is an educator, and credits her Montessori training for giving her the tools to pursue the Good Graces journey. Montessori teaches about the heart-hand connection– something important to her, as someone who has always loved to make things and share them with loved ones. That training also awakened an intrinsic love of botany.

“I’ve been on a self-led discovery for the past decade or so,” Wyckoff says. “My family lives in the woods … we have a plethora and abundance of native habitat that’s life-giving and beautiful.”

While nurturing this connection to PNW ecology, she’s learned to cultivate plants that have beneficial properties and are deer resistant (like lavender and rosemary, which grow to be woody). She also grows one of her favorite herbs, the calendula flower, which adorns her logo and is well known in herbal medicine to help heal the skin.

She spoke about the resinous cottonwood bud, which “grow like weeds around here,” and can be collected and infused to become balmof-Gilead when they’re knocked from the trees in windy Novembers. She infuses herbs using a slow, natural method, where they’re steeped in oil under the natural light and heat of the sun for weeks, which “allows the release of the good stuff.”

When the business began, Wyckoff made mostly salves and soaps, the latter of which she creates from scratch using lye, water, plant-derived oils (barring palm oil, which Good Graces no longer uses), and any other ingredients called for by the recipe. She uses food-grade ingredients like walnut shells or sea salt as exfoliants, carrot juice and flowers for colorant, moisturizing butters, clarifying clays, and only biodegradable essential oils for their properties and scents. Over time, she’s expanded to create muscle rubs, lip balms, lotions, salt soaks, essential oil perfumes, and soy wax candles. Every product is vegan, and all her packaging is biodegradable, reusable, or recyclable.

She also finds great importance in the social connections she forms through her business, and collaborating with other local artisans and womenowned businesses. Local artist Joshua Bowens designed her logo, and local crystal artist Mindful Living Studios provides crystals for her candles. Early on, she became part of Whatcom Art Market, and loves the cooperative nature of the organization.

“One of the ways I collaborate with other artists in town is through my participation in the Whatcom Art Market, because it’s a co-op. We all work the co-op, we all take turns taking shifts,” says Wyckoff. “Through that network of local artists, my business was able to take off pretty quickly. I learned so many things from them, [and gained] the social support system of a group of artists.”

If you’d like to connect, collaborate, or learn with Wyckoff, she’s thrilled to be a vendor at the Bellingham Farmers Market this season where you can see her in person and pick up online orders for no extra charge. Bellingham, goodgracessoaps.myshopify.com 