Simply Pure Products offers skin-healthy soaps

They sound good enough to eat. Apple Cider Bar. Blackberry Vanilla. Cinnamon Hazelnut. Mmmm. Gingerbread.

Simply Pure Products creator Barbara Weldon agrees. But she warns you ought to look before you taste –- nibbling her delicious treats would take washing your mouth out with soap to a whole new level.

Just in time for Christmas, Weldon’s homemade, handmade, healthy, organic, hypoallergenic skin care and body products comprise an array of delectable stocking stuffers and last-minute gifts for everybody on your holiday list.

“That’s where we shine,” said Weldon, taking a rare break during what will go down as her busiest season yet. “We can customize gifts for teachers, for mom, for dad. Everybody. You’ll find something for every single person on your Christmas list.”

Simply Pure Products offers a wide variety of hand-made soaps, lotions, make-up, bath salts, hair care products and more, each custom-designed and carefully developed to address what Weldon calls an “epidemic” in the personal care industry.

“Really, it’s alarming what people don’t know, what you don’t pay attention to,” she said of ingredients in typical commercial lotions and soaps.

“I mean, look at the ingredients. If the first one is a petroleum product, maybe you should consider an alternative.”

By putting what is essentially a gasoline by-product on your skin, Weldon said, American consumers are “slowly poisoning themselves.”

She ticked off ingredients in a commercial lotion — propylene glycol was the first ingredient in one national brand. “That’s the main ingredient in antifreeze,” Weldon said. “It’s used to de-ice an airplane. Watch those guys working at the airport — they’ve got on Haz-mat suits. My God, you want that on your body?”

She knows from personal experience: It was her skin-sensitive young son, Aedan, who drove her to develop Simply Pure Products four years ago.

Her third child, of four, Aedan developed a terrible rash, eczema, at just two weeks of age.

“His skin would crack and bleed,” Weldon said, visibly cringing at the memory of the pain her now 8-year-old boy endured. “We tried everything. Literally everything” to cure the extremely dry skin, including various over-the-counter remedies and, in the end, steroid creams.

But nothing helped.

Looking for an answer

Weldon, frustrated, turned to her propensity for exhaustive research, something she’d developed while an English major at Liberty University near Lynchburg in the 1990s -– for an answer.

“I love to study a problem, really dig for an answer,” Weldon said. She began looking more closely at ingredient lists of the creams and potions she was slathering on her young son.

“I was stunned to find that all of them had these petroleum products. The more I dug, the more I found that so many people are allergic to that, plus, how can that be good for you? How can putting a gasoline [derivative] all over your body be good? There had to be another answer.”

Weldon “scrapped everything” she was being told by society, advertising and even her doctors, and found an all-natural product; she started simple, with just an oil-based bar of soap.

In two days, literally, the problem disappeared.

“I was amazed,” she said. “It was expensive, but the skin started to heal. Like he’d never had a problem. It was night-and-day.”

And with that, Simply Pure Products was born.

Formerly a stay-at-home mom to her four children, Weldon began small, and close to home, trying out old-time potions, lotions and recipes for home-made soap and shampoo, preparing it first for her family – children now aged 12 to 6 — then for an eager web of friends and neighbors who all but lined up to be her “guinea pigs,” she said, as she became more and more sophisticated in her growing product line.

“People have been making soaps and lotions for hundreds of years,” Weldon said. “I figured I could easily tap into that information. The trick was to make it affordable.”

Starting on her kitchen stovetop, Weldon began to experiment with recipes for soap. Just a few basic ingredients (coconut oil, purified water, an exfoliating agent such as dried apricot seeds) were mixed and melted, and re-formed into a bar, something easy to package and easy to deliver.

“I don’t believe healthy should be out of reach,” Weldon said.“By keeping a low overhead, I’m able to keep the prices low.”

The “flavors” of the tasty sounding specialties come from the addition of essential oils – concentrated and distilled from actual ingredients rather than the chemical versions duplicated by the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture beauty products commercially.

Birth of a business

Simply Pure Products, which Weldon incorporated in 2007, soon outgrew her home kitchen. The company, which now has three part-time employees, one full-timer plus Weldon, moved this fall to a 4,000 square-foot space in Vint Hill.

“We increased production by 500 percent,” Weldon said. “I’m able to cap costs by ordering in bulk now. We print our own labels, we do our own bottling, we keep it local all we can.

“I’m willing to do whatever is necessary to keep the quality up and the cost down,” she added. “I feel like a company loses integrity and quality when it starts outsourcing. For us, it’s all about helping people.”

The move to Vint Hill meant so much more business for Simply Pure that Weldon said she “nearly quit,” so fierce was the pull on her family time.

Her accountant, Sarah Overhulser, came to the rescue, moving into a full-time position and working as Weldon’s partner.

“She’s helping me take it to the next level,” Weldon said of Overhulser. “It allows me to concentrate on what I do best, which is product development. Stirring the pot, literally.

“I just love to see it when you take a dollop of oil, and mix some things, and tweak it, and stir, and it suddenly becomes lotion. That makes me very excited.”

It takes months of careful research and trials, Weldon said, to “find the perfect recipe” for a new product.

Simply Pure Products is sold at the Vint Hill office as well as at The Farmer’s Wife in Remington.

For the tough guy, too

“I found out about Simply Pure two years ago,” said Carrie Foscato, a graphic designer from Amissville. “My mom had seen their booth at a local trade fair. She’s really into healthy products, and she knew I was upset about my skin.

“When I hit my 30s, my skin totally changed, and I developed rosacea,” a common problem with redness and broken blood vessels that made Foscato’s nose, in her own words, “look like the surface of the moon”

“I’d tried everything,” Foscato said, recalling her growing despair. “My mom got me this Simply Pure product, Sweet Cheeks, a lotion.”

Within a day, she was convinced.

“I looked in the mirror the second day,” she recalled. “It was gone. I was crying.”

“That’s the way it always goes,” Weldon added. “My favorite story was of this lady who wanted to help her husband who had terrible dry skin in the winter. She brought him in and I was showing him this soap and bath salts.

“Here’s this guy, and he’s being sweet because his wife’s doing this for him but he’s rolling his eyes.

“Obviously, she got him into that bathtub, because the next day or so, he calls me up and tells me he’s convinced. He said his skin had never felt better, never felt softer, or more natural.

“Even if you don’t think you’re allergic to the petroleum products, even if your skin feels pretty good, I invite you to see how much better it will feel, how much better it is, for your whole system, with the wholesome ingredients we use.”