Soilscents was born out of a family’s long-drawn love affair with nature.

Once every year, the parents and two kids, Adon and Minna would pack their bags and fly out to towns and villages around the world.

On their way back, Seema Anil would have her bags ballooned up. With lavender leaves plucked from Medjugorge in Bosnia or seven colour soil scooped from Mauritius or home-made soaps gifted by village mothers or medicinal potions bought from old herbalists.

Seema’s children had a million reasons to frown at her.

“My mom still keeps in her room the sea buckthorn leaves dried over years and lavender stems now covered with mould,” says Minna, her college-going daughter with a grin. Once, in the Spanish port city of Valencia, a thrilled Seema ran about the wayside plucking and picking fallen Valencia oranges. Raw, ripe, and rotten. Some she thrust in her bag to bring home to peel and sniff and rub on her skin.

“It was her devout passion for organic sources of health and wellness that led us to experiment with such items at home,” says Adon, her younger son.

Over the years, Seema hand-made ethical, natural, vegan face packs, body masks, herbal scrubs and leaf powders to give her daughter. Minna used them on herself for delightful results and then gifted some to her classmates. On some evenings when she got bored, she smacked these packs on her obedient brother as well.

Passion turned into fun. Fun grew into thrill. And thrill made way to sales. When some family friends came asking for more such face creams, the family of four huddled together and glanced at each other: Well, why not?

That was their ‘Aha!’ moment.

Thorough professional research followed. Dermatologists. Clinical experts. Renowned chemists. The family chose only true-blue subject experts who valued their vision for ethical products. Two long years of daily experiments later, they finalised on a small range of chosen wellness products.

Thus, soilscents was born.

To kiss the world with love.

This family’s wish was to create the world’s best skincare solutions for themselves.

And then for their own townswomen and men. At affordable prices without worrying about profits. They wanted it all locally made. They wanted it to be a limited edition.

No mass production. No voracious profits.

All ingredients are procured with care under their personal supervision. Right from the farms to their small production unit to packaging to distribution.

“Our priority is customer happiness,” says Minna Elizabeth, who overlooks the branding and outreach wing of soilscents. “We are not in this for profit alone. We believe in collective joy. Hence our feedback analysis programme is quite stringent. We listen to each and every buyer. They are not just faces for us. They are our extended family.”

We come with different skin types. Hence we come with different beauty care needs. Soilscents has something for everyone. And each pack is based on a formula built with precious essential oils.

For instance, the Shea Argan face cream uses sea buckthorn oil. It is freshly pressed out of sea buckthorn berries native to Europe. It comes with medicinal compounds as well as nutrients. The cream also uses chamomile essential oil, geranium essential oil and lavender essential oil and argan oil as well. That’s the kind of care that goes into each production.

High-value therapeutic essential oils are the foundation of soilscents products.

Each ingredient going into soilscents product is ensured as clean, safe, ethical, and purely natural. “We ourselves have seen how deceptive many skincare products in the market are in terms of using cheap and unsafe components,” says Seema Anil. “Would we give anything unsafe to our own children? So we treat every buyer the same way.”

Clean, pure ingredients are procured from around the world. The products are locally made, guarded by the highest quality standards. “So much care about purity goes into every soilscents product that they are used first at our home,” says Seema.

At every stage of progression, medical practitioners are consulted. Subject matter experts in cosmetology, dermatology and allergy research are brought in. Each step is ensured as fool-proof. Each composition is assured as nourishment-rich and of immense benefit to the user. Soilscents uses no paraffin, no artificial colours, no chemical preservatives and no animal-cruelty components.

“Integrity to the product quality is a value our family has safeguarded from the times of our grandpa TT Devassy who ran his namesake jewellery business,” says Seema.

For this third-generation family-run business, product ethics come before any profit.

Care. That’s a term soilscents has taken to its heart.