DAY ONE!!! (It’s finally here!)

Leafology Journal: Leaves, Shoots & Roots

Hooray hooray!! It’s DAY ONE. After months of crazy behind-the-scenes obsession and hard work, Leafology is official and the online shop is OPEN. Ta da!!

Tell your friends, family & everyone you know!

It’s been just 9 months since I decided to officially combine my passion for natural skincare/beauty products & my tea addiction. In September/October I threw earl grey to the wind & announced that I was taking the plunge; I decided to make the products I’d been concocting for myself (and giving to friends and family) legally available for sale. The process of learning to be slightly business minded as well as creative has been eyelash-opening (and actually really fun); learning about which regulations apply and how to adhere to which rules in order to sell where (toxicologist assessment, certification, the mathematics of it all) plus the practical side of things like designing product labels (who knew how excited I would become about fonts?), how to create a website and also, um, how to occasionally delegate and hire professionals who know how to do the seemingly impossible. (It turns out it’s really hard to photograph products on a pure white background without a full array of lights; seriously, the precision this involves quite possibly rivals any photoshoot I’ve modelled for as an actual real-life human being. Thank goodness my rather surreal ‘day job’ meant I have a phone full of photographer contacts.)

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Hilltops & Blue Tack

Leafology Journal: Leaves, Shoots & Roots, Uncategorised

When I was a teenager, I blue-tacked to the top of my walls a border made from stuck-together calendar pages. I almost never use calendars in a proper way (though am best friends with my scheduling diary – retro these days to have a physical one – we are halfway through 2017 and mine is already starting to fall apart from over-use). The images were all of nature themes – an insect on a dew-dropped leaf; a precise row of perfectly curved rocks leading out to an open ocean; a field of outrageously vibrant poppies (like in this photo I took the other day while out on a modelling shoot location), or an autumnal forest with a half-glow of light, a chaos of orange, reddened and chestnut coloured leaves, a soft bed in the forest. I used to look at them, one by one, and imagine myself inside their worlds. This was pre-instagram/meme-age, but each photograph had a quote superimposed over it for a casual bit of inspiration, and my all time favourite was this one:

‘Do not follow where the path may lead, but find your own way and lead a trail’.

When I was in Indonesia for the first time nearly two years ago, a healer asked me some questions, and one of them was ‘do you consider yourself a leader?’

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Seven Things to Pack for On-The-Road Bliss & Natural Goodness-hood

Leafology Journal: Leaves, Shoots & Roots

I’m just back from a 2 month trip away (you’ll know all about this if you’ve been following my instagram account, which got a bit green and leafy and very very tropical – lucky me!) and am now deep in the throes of jetlag (generally feeling a bit upside down) and rushing off to things here there and everywhere… I’m excited to say I can now share a little travel-themed guest post I wrote during said jaunt for The Essential Life. In it, I detail 7 different go-to addictions of mine – natural beauty secrets, plant remedies and ingredients without which I simply would not be!

Yep:

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We each have a superpower

Leafology Journal: Leaves, Shoots & Roots

My friend has the ability to remember every detail of who ate what at which restaurant in which year; whether they liked it, who served us, who rode home in which car, which couple had a fight… I am continually amazed by her (and grateful, since she is the group’s keeper of history in technicolour detail) – it is dazzling!

When it comes to me, well, I’ve dabbled in useful/useless skill sets, but one thing is clear: I’ve always had a super-sensitive nose. Sometimes more of a curse than a blessing, I have fun with it anyway and I am realising now how much this sense of mine has begun to lead my life in new directions.

The sense of smell is deeply, deeply powerful; a host of both memory and small pleasures.

Dating sites are filled with flowery-dreamy ‘like’ lists which start so often with ‘I like how the grass smells after rain’. And clichés abound around wood-fires and salty sea air…

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