Welcome to Icemelk and our musings section! Here you will find out information about Canada, beauty and local botanicals - so all things we are about. Watch out for upcoming articles on what to pack for your Whistler vacation, DIY botanical face masks and more.

But first, read below and get to know us some more and how we started with a raspberry bush. And drop a comment below about where you are in the world.

It started with a raspberry bush...

My love of natural beauty products started early after watching my grandmother utilize natural ingredients as skin care remedies: buttermilk slathered on for sunburns, cornstarch as a deodorant, and oats and honey for a face mask. During that time the emphasis was on synthetics products, so her ways were unconventional but left a profound impression on me. She was born in a tiny coastal town in British Columbia across from Haida Gwaii and had a love of embracing natural elements in the everyday and living a simple, harmonious life. The back of her garden was filled with raspberry bushes and so raspberries became my earliest form of lipstick and blush as I mushed them on my lips and cheeks. Little did I know they would become a key ingredient for a cosmetics line. 

She encouraged me to make my own goods from scratch: a lot of baked goods, a scarf that took eight years to knit, and of course natural skin care products. I gravitated to the skin care products and for several years, I devoured any book I could find on diy beauty and relished in creating my own scrubs, face masks, lip balms and homemade labels. After working abroad several years for multi-national companies including a major beauty company, home beckoned me and I returned to Canada. At once I was struck by the beauty of the region and marveled in the dense botanicals in this untouched area of the world.  It wasn't something I had noticed before, but returning home it was unmistakable. After the birth of my child, I became extremely aware of the ingredients in products that I used on my skin as they would come into contact with my baby. I was dissatisfied with the shades and textures of natural colour cosmetics especially. The colours weren't quite right, nor was the performance. And so what converged was my need for natural cosmetics that performed and my newfound love of these incredible Canadian botanicals. And so Icemelk was born. 

There are some key Canadian ingredients that I love working with: raspberries, maple syrup and extract, ice wine, blackberries, cranberries, meadowfoam and hemp. And of course 24K gold!

What kind of products would you be interested in us creating?