Meet Farm To Skin, the brand committed to providing the most beautiful, thoughtfully made products. We speak with the company’s founder, Patricia Walker, to learn the brand’s story.
Tell us about your background; what led you into this field and how did Farm To Skin come into existence? It all started when we moved from a suburb of Orlando to a farmstead in Lake County, a more rural area of central Florida. My husband and I fell in love with the beautiful countryside while riding our mountain bikes there on the weekends. Not long after we moved, I began making soap with milk from our goats, which allowed me to experiment and explore my creative side. It was then that I discovered making skincare was something I loved. This led my focus to plant oils, and I became fascinated with how seeds, leaves, and flowers contain oils with potent vitamins and antioxidants, making them nature’s best kept secret for overall health. Our farm now includes a 40-acre tree farm, greenhouses, and hundreds of acres of open pastures, where we grow many of the ingredients used in Farm To Skin’s products, and a new studio, where I can formulate while looking over our serene environment.
What makes Farm To Skin different? We are committed to providing the most beautiful, thoughtfully made products using nature’s purest ingredients to balance, treat, and restore your skin. Our farm gives us the unique opportunity to curate at every stage of creation. From propagation to distillation, we see nature’s beautiful simplicity and complex variations first-hand. Our blends are precisely formulated and advanced without cutting any corners. To maximize effectiveness, we choose organic unrefined oils and bioactive hydrosols, never water, aloe or fillers. We also keep our precious blends protected in black glass and try to minimize the use of plastic in our packaging. And never, ever, ever will you find parabens, synthetic fragrance, petroleum, sulfates, phenoxyethanol, animal by-products, or harsh chemicals. We love our surroundings too much to curate anything less!
How are your products sourced and produced? We source many ingredients from our own farm and from small farms across the U.S. I love visiting our farming partners to not only learn their practices, but to get to know them on a personal basis, too. Our products are handmade in small batches to ensure quality, freshness, and effectiveness and are hand-poured with care.
Why has it been important to you, personally, to build your brand and your product line in this manner? I honestly cannot imagine building a brand any other way! Medical research shows that a plant-based diet can prevent and even reverse disease, and I firmly believe the same can be said about our skin. I hand blend, pour, and ship out our products with pride and confidence because we have put so much thought and research into our products’ effectiveness, ingredients and formulations.
Which products from your line are a part of your daily routine? My skincare regime is anything but routine. I love to rotate products daily and am constantly testing out new ingredients and formulas! For the past several months, I have been working on a new facial mask with unique ingredients like spirulina and reishi mushroom. Getting creative with new ingredients and product combinations makes for a really fun day at the office!
Which product is the cult favorite, and why? Our Minimalist Balm has long been our best-seller due to its light scent and multitude of uses. I have had people suggest we should sell it in five-gallon buckets! Women enjoy it as a makeup remover or hair tamer, men use it as a hand moisturizer, mothers keep it handy for the kids, and people who suffer from eczema swear by it. Its universal use also makes it perfect for travel!
What do you hope is next for Farm To Skin? I am excited to share we are working on our first Farm To Skin masterclass! I am looking forward to discussing why switching to plant-based beauty is not only a healthy option, but is more effective, too. Working in small groups, I will share stories behind our products and how we have chosen our ingredients and open up the discussion for others to share their daily rituals. Most importantly, we will focus on the daily self-talk we have while looking into the mirror and how we can create a positive impact on our lives simply by speaking words of love and kindness to ourselves. My hope is to bring our conversation to new towns and cities, covering every demographic across the country.
