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Healing Beauty

by Celia Shatzman

Vered Back, founder of Vered Organic Botanicals, channeled an illness into something beautiful, with a therapeutic luxury scent and skincare line relaunching now

Vered Back has always loved working with natural ingredients and clean beauty. But when she became very ill, she decided to take her health into her own hands and study herbalism. For eight years she struggled with Chronic Lyme Disease, dealing with debilitating pain and treatments that didn’t help, dropping to 89 pounds.

“I said that only nature can heal me and this is my path,” she recalls. “Two weeks into the herbalism course I made my own extractions and medicine. I felt a shift. I couldn’t eat for a year and suddenly I could eat. I really started to heal from that moment. It took a few years. And then I said if I can heal my body internally, I can heal the skin externally. Everything that comes on our skin comes from our internal organs, hormones and mood.”

Back applied her medicinal knowledge and created her first serum. Targeting problematic skin, it restored a pH balance with anti-viral and anti-inflammatory herbs. After the success of the serum, she created a toner and anti-aging products. She launched Vered Organic Botanicals in 2011, a line that integrates her handcrafted medicinal plant extracts with the holistic science of aromatherapy.

Vered Organic Botanicals has now undergone a dramatic relaunch, with a fresh look, some reformulating, and luxurious new products, including facial oils, and gorgeous packaging. Her line will also be available in travel sizes for the first time. The process took two and a half years. “In the beginning all I cared about was ingredients, not packaging, but in this world everything matters,” she says. “It’s going to be the most beautiful packaging in the green industry by far. Now it really represents the quality of my ingredients.”

Back has focused on fragrance, since perfumes are the most toxic products in the beauty industry. She includes a blend of healing essential oils in her scents that aids the immune system. Now Vered Organic Botanicals includes eight scents, four oil-based and four with a base of organic grape alcohol. Each fragrance does more than smell amazing—they have a deeper purpose. For example, Deep Citron is an uplifting citrus scent with notes of sandalwood, vetiver, ylang-ylang, green tangerine and jasmine sambac. She created Blue Violet to heal her heart after she lost her brother in a tragic accident a few years ago. Helpful for those dealing with depression or a difficult time, it features blue violet and jasmine to lift the spirits. Her new perfume, Divinité, includes three different roses, chocolate, cocoa and cardamom for a sultry blend to boost the libido. A gifted formulator with exquisite taste, Back’s fragrances are beautiful exotic blends. Unlike many natural fragrances, which, for example, may smell like lavender or sandalwood, etc., here it is impossible to tease out the individual components, which makes these unique and extremely seductive.

“The minute you smell every product in my line—you have to inhale before you use it because you get the benefits of it going from the nose to the brain—it changes your mood,” Back says. “They will change your thoughts, shift from negative to positive, and your overall wellbeing. They will help you keep your body and mind in a healthy place.” veredbotanicals.com

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