Creating GreenSpirit Craft Ghee-Based Face & Body Butters

Making Artisanal Seasonal Face & Body Butters In Sonoma

Handcrafting these seasonal face & body butters is a several weeks process with multiple layers.

It starts with herbal oil infusions & washing of ghee.

After all the herbal goodness is anchored into the liquid safflower oil & the solid ghee, materials are gathered, and workspace is cleaned & sanitized, while I listen to planet healing, heart opening, and groove inducing tracks. :)

I use my Reiki/Life Source Energy channels to:

*Send love & thanks to the ingredients & energies of the plants,

*Ask for them to gift you all the love & support they can give, for your skin, your mind, your spirit and...

*Open your eyes, your ears, and your heart so you in return can lend your support to them, your extended Earth family that nurtures you so generously.

Jars are filled and labeled, and let’s not forget: someone’s gotta clean all this up!

Each jar of Winter Balm & Summer Butter you hold in your hands is the result of all that infusing, washing, weighing, melting, blending, and whipping!

For those of you who want to dive deeply into even more detail, here’s the breakdown.

Who The Heck is Katrina Matos?

Once upon a time, as a kid in the Bronx, my mom and two grandmas took care of me with herbal teas. I talked to trees, read fairytales & myths, went camping upstate and gazed into lakes, looking for water sprites.

When I grew up, I became a massage therapist, an esthetician, and Reiki practitioner. The magical, nature-loving, ancient traditions “me” got together with the modern, industrialized, science “me” and created a fabulous face & body butter.

Seasonal Skin Care Formulas

A seasonal blend of herbs infused into safflower oil & ghee is the base for both of my balms. I drew on my knowledge of *Ayurveda & Traditional Chinese Medicine, as well as Western herbalism, along with my own intuitive experiences, to create these seasonal herb blends.

Summer Butter is formulated to support your skin through Spring & Summer: hydrating, cooling, airy, and anti-inflammatory. Marshmallow leaves, lavender, coconut oil, red raspberry seed oil are a few of the ingredients.

Winter Balm supports you through Autumn & Winter: hydrating, earthy, lightly warming & stimulating, with its own anti-inflammatory action. It includes marshmallow root, turmeric root, pomegranate seed oil, and cardamom.

According to Traditional Asian Medicine, and many other Earth Medicine health traditions, your body needs different support depending on the season. It’s also helpful to your skin to be gently stimulated by not using the exact same formula on it year round.

Slow Skin Care From Garden To Face

Some of the botanicals I grow organically in my Sonoma County garden: lavender, calendula, and gotu kola.

When there’s enough daytime sun & warmth, I use the radiant heat from the stone here in my back yard to infuse the herbs into the oils. I supplement that with using my dehydrator on a low 100 degree setting at night, or on cloudy days. This happens over 2-3 weeks.

While the oil infuses, I infuse the clarified butter several times with my seasonal herbal blend. This deodorizes the butter, and saturates the butter in herbal goodness.

On the last round, I wrap the solid butter into some clean cheesecloth or wax paper until the next step.

The last phase of the process is to take my strained liquid base oil, my solid herbal butter, and melt and blend them with the other oils, beeswax, vitamin E, and a whisper of essential oils. I whip the balm and package it.

I’m very sparing & deliberate about how I use essential oils, and how much I use. There are negative impacts on human health and planetary health when using essential oils excessively. They're extremely resource intensive to produce. (That’s a whole other blogpost!)

My formulating process creates a very subtly scented face & body butter that is deeply nurturing to your skin, your emotions and nervous system.

Food Grade & Organic Ingredients

The majority of ingredients in GSC products are both food grade and organic. Choosing fresh, full vitality ingredients creates stellar skin care that’s easily recognized, absorbed and used by your skin cells, in the same way that choosing the best quality food you can access makes for the best tasting, most nutritious meals.

Ghee Moisturizer From Clarified Cow Butter

These face & body balms have a butter base for a very important reason.

Our skin cells function best with a certain percentage of cholesterol, and this clarified cow butter is the easiest way for me to provide you with a high quality, food grade, organic source.

Ayurveda has done this for centuries. Other cultures have used animal tallow in a similar way.

Cholesterol, Ceramides & Essential Fatty Acids for Skin: Yes!

Even the highest quality oils can still cause problems with skin imbalances like flaky skin & pore clogging if the proportions aren’t right.

Your skin cells need 3 things in a certain proportion to be really healthy & function well: Cholesterol, ceramides, and essential fatty acids.

They keep your skin cells strong & flexible, and your skin soft, hydrated, firm, elastic and resilient.

Besides the cholesterol-rich ghee, I use liquid plant oils with a high ceramide, essential fatty acid and linoleic acid content. This minimizes issues with pore clogging, while strengthening your skin barrier.

As an added benefit, these high quality fats feed your friendly skin bacteria, causing them to create more ceramides for you, doing what..?

Giving you more resilient, well moisturized and good looking skin!

No Preservatives & Emulsifiers

Winter Balm & Summer Butter are water-free balms, so they’re very concentrated and self stable.

They’re complex creations, vital and effective, while also having a simple ingredient list. There’s no preservatives, emulsifiers, no synthetic fragrance, color or any synthetic ingredients at all.

This supports your skin microbiome by encouraging a healthy balance of friendly bacteria on your skin, and resilient skin barrier function overall. Having none of those ingredients to filter out also supports your lymph system.

Herbal Energetics & Reiki Energy

Are you familiar with the idea of herbs having energetic qualities that accompany their biochemical actions on the tissues of the body? They may be classified as cooling, stimulating, moistening, or having an inward or downward influence, for example.

The final element of my formula is the most subtle of all: the energy of the herbs and oils, and the Reiki energy I infuse into every batch I formulate. All herbs and oils can influence our mental & emotional state, as well as our physical bodies. Their effects move from the dense tissue that is our flesh, into the more subtle vibrations that are our thoughts & feelings.

Think about natural aromas that you love, or really dislike, and how they make you feel; you’ll see what I mean!

If you’re not familiar with it, Reiki is a practice where the practitioner lays hands on, or just above a person or object, and channels Life Source Energy for the well-being of the receiver.

In my case, when I say that my products are infused with Reiki, it means I’m connecting with the vital life energy all around us and in my ingredients, then using that connection to fill the products with loving intentions for the deepest good of the person using them.

Have you ever eaten a meal, and thought, “This tastes like it was made with such love.” That’s how I want you to feel when you use these face & body butters. :)

The combination of Life Source Energy coupled with Sonoma sun & stone, the loving intentions from the plants, myself, and the Reiki energy channel, gives a heartfelt energy hug to lift your spirits.

Reciprocal Relationships With Our Earth Family

When you use this balm, I also want you to feel like you’re visiting with much loved family or friends.

As humans, our relationship with plant & earth-based elements span thousands of years of richness, ritual, and co-evolution. These beings are part of our ancestral lineage, just like our human ancestors (and we’re part of theirs.)

These family members are our daily companions as we navigate through life. Their lives weave with ours, as we co-create the future we leave for our descendants. What will that future be?

Let’s live in a way where each member of our Earth family has their opportunity to truly thrive, where we give back to them as generously as they give to us.

*Speaking of Earth family, since Ayurveda is where I owe the deepest influence on how I formulate, and how I recommend caring for your skin, I donate part of GSC profits to American India Foundation as a way to give back.

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