Priya Means Love

Milestones: last month I was on TV!  My business was featured on Burlington’s evening and morning news as part of their Made in Vermont series — watch it via the link in my profile! I was so nervous about it, but somehow this 3 minute segment captured the heart of my little business. It aired a few days before my 45th birthday — a lovely little present for me that I am so grateful for!

At the same time, October marked the 15th anniversary (!) of my first ever craft show, in a church basement in Toronto way back in 2009, where we lived for four years before moving to Baltimore. It felt like such a big leap to summon my limited energy to make batches of goods I’d been making for myself, in hopes that other people might actually buy them and be into them. And though not many people came, they were kind, I sold some things, and I felt encouraged and supported, and holiday season 2009 I vended at a bunch more markets. I can’t decide if my business is essentially the same as it was then? or whether it’s wildly different. My ethos around formulating certainly hasn’t change — every single ingredient radically all-natural and something I’m excited about (beautiful goods from beautiful materials, just like how I like to cook), with an intense focus on how the product resonates with my own extremely sensitive body — and if you look closely at the last pic, you’ll even see some products that remain in my line!  Lavender Mud Hair & Scalp Cleanser, Balsam Fir Deodorant, and Herbal Lip Therapy…. some formulations you just can’t improve on. But in other ways, what a wild evolution. I actually feel like the biggest change for me is internal: for years I had impostor syndrome about this trivial thing I was doing!  It took like 8 or 9 years for me to get over that lol. I still didn’t feel like I had my act together then, but I stopped feeling as embarrassed about it and realized that’s just what life feels like. Now I feel like life is random, life paths are deeply weird, and that that strangeness is almost universal. Does anyone out there really have it together? I’ve got my doubts!

Hey, speaking of having it together (or not), my market schedule is in the comments!

Fall is skin-in-need season!  I’ve got you covered.  Some fine picks: Deep Radiance Face Cream (protective, so nourishing, locks in moisture, helps with residual summer heat), body butters (perfect after a warm shower), Cloud Cream and Glow Cream (for all over the body), Herbal Lip Therapy (slather on the clear at night), Pomegranate Eye Serum (wonderful year-round, but undereye oils are classic for the transitions of autumn), and Nail & Cuticle Balsam (for those parched and peeling fingertips). 🍂 Plus a spooky new soft goth sheer black lippie, for fun!

Workshops + Markets 🗞 Baltimore folks, I will be back in town in a couple of weeks! I’ll be vending at on May 11th (the day before Mother’s Day hint hint). There’ll be new goods! You all will be the first to smell my new red spruce body butter made from trees here (it’s really nice). Baltimore folks, please feel free to order online and include a note that you’d like to pick up at Remfest, and I’ll refund shipping if you get charged for it.
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And on the day before, on Friday, May 10th, I’ll be teaching an herbal salve workshop at my good friends and collaborators — it’s been five whole years since my last workshop there, and I cannot wait! The second pic is of infused oils in process that we’ll use in the workshop (comfrey, calendula, chamomile, and lavandin from left to right). Info and tickets at the link in my profile.
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And once I’m back in VT I’ll be vending at a few farmers markets here and there: Burlington (6/1, 8/3, 10/12) and likely Bristol and Montpelier (dates TBD).
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Last pic is of my Rose + Chamomile BB Cream, favorite skin-perfecting day cream skin magic, just because the sun is getting high. ☀️ Hope to see you soon!

Goings on! I'm going to be teaching a body butter workshop in NYC at Earth & Me on Sunday 9/24! If you know me you know I love an aromatically warming body butter to keep my body grounded and my skin happy during the transition to colder weather, and I'm excited to teach others the ins and outs of how to formulate and handmake these luxurious skin treats. It'll be lovely to honor the fall equinox with a group of folks on the outdoor patio at Earth & Me, a zero waste, community-oriented shop that has inspired me since they opened in 2021 (and who carries my work, proud to say). Already plotting a spiced cider syrup sparkling cocktail + mocktail for the group! Info and tix here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/body-butter-workshop-to-greet-autumn-tickets-705661872657
Pictured is my body scrub workshop from May at which was my first since the pandemic! The cutest group who made gorgeous scrubs and had the best energy.
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Labor Day weekend is a big market weekend for me! Find me at the Mad River Valley Craft Fair https://www.madrivercraftfair.com/ in beautiful Warren, VT on Sept 2+3 alongside over 60 other artists. And find me on Labor Day, September 4 back at the !
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Lastly, my not-quite-monthly newsletter comes out on Monday -- sign up here! http://eepurl.com/0O69n There are a few special products -- batches too small to list -- that newsletter subscribers will get the first crack at.

Long time no post, but it’s glorious summer, and I’m vending at my first markets in Vermont!  On Monday I’ll be at , and on Thursday I’ll be at the Midd Summer Market.  Full summer schedule here:

•Monday, June 5, 4-7 pm — Bristol Farmers Market, Bristol, VT
•Thursday, June 8, 3:30-7:30 pm — Midd Summer Market, Middlebury, VT
•Saturday, June 17, 3-8 pm — Pocock Rocks Music Festival and Street Fair, Bristol, VT
•Thursday, June 29, 3:30-7:30 pm — Midd Summer Market, Middlebury, VT
•Monday, July 3, 4-7 pm — Bristol Farmers Market, Bristol, VT
•Thursday, July 27, 3:30-7:30 pm — Midd Summer Market, Middlebury, VT
•Monday, September 4, 4-7 pm — Bristol Farmers Market, Bristol, VT

So many new goods are coming with me!  Go Easy Cream, the best for tender achy bodies in need of gentle daily care. Lavanilla Cloud Butter, dreamy nourishment especially good for post-sun, an olfactory hug. Criollo Lip Therapy, an excellent 90s brown iron oxide lipstick. Forest in Spring, a limited hand and body cream with white pine pitch I foraged in February, sparkly forest magic. Cloud Butter, unscented and really lovely, all over body nourishment.  And a pic from last month.

Order by this WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14 for lower 48 delivery by Christmas Eve! It looks quite possible that we’ll be snowed in here from Friday morning through Saturday (and unable to get to the post office!), so if you get me your order by late Wednesday night, I will hustle and get it out on Thursday. If you miss the deadline and want to cross your fingers for holiday delivery, go ahead and place your order over the weekend and choose PRIORITY MAIL, and I’ll get it out on Monday — this is USPS’s Priority Mail deadline, so it *should* get there in time, but once it’s out of my hands I can't do much, so no guarantees!
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We just got back home(!) to Vermont late last night, hearts very full from our time in Baltimore for Holiday Heap. I feel incredibly supported by this community — so grateful to all of you who came to Heap and made this market amazing for me, who asked about life up here over the last month, to new and old supporters of my business who have made it possible for me to make this big change. If you were at Heap, you saw my husband Brian working beside me at a market for the very first time! So exciting, and I love how it felt. And it was liberating and exciting to have a chunk of time right in the middle of the holiday season where I’m not holed up in my workshop cranking out product nonstop (my usual for, oh, over a decade) and was instead out in the world, seeing old friends, putting on Heap with my amazing pals, staying with friends and collaborators , enjoying my old city. My chemical sensitivities haven’t stopped shaping my life, but now that I’m up in the woods with clean air, it seems (maybe too early to say, but it sure does seem) that I’m no longer in constant flareup, so I can roll with exposure with more ease — and it helps knowing that as of Sunday late night, I’d be back in my bed in the woods, hair washed, gazing out at the pointy balsams and starry dreamscape. (cont'd in comments)

I have big news to share: I am moving up to Vermont, to live in the northern forests I love! First things first: Priya Means Love will continue and in fact be growing — my husband Brian will be working with me on the business once we're set up in our new home. All your faves will come back into stock in a few weeks. If you've been in the online shop lately, you've noticed that the stock is a little thin (where is the Deep Radiance Face Cream, you ask, the Cloud Cream, the Herbal Lip Therapy?) -- this is why!

I will miss you, Baltimore, but you'll still see me from time to time! I'll be back for Holiday Heap on December 10th, and in general I hope to be back at least a couple times of year to vend at a market or teach a workshop here and there.

I moved here way back in 2012 (from Toronto, where PML started -- hey Toronto folks! 👋), and I've been so lucky to find kindred spirits and a welcoming community here. This city and the many, many kind customers who have supported me have made it possible for this small, quixotic one-woman business to thrive, and I am so grateful to you all. Every message of how my work resonates with you, with your bodies and your spirits, helps me feel that what I'm doing, all alone hermitlike in my workshop, is actually a form of deep communication worth pursuing.

Sadly the reason I started this work is the reason I have to leave the city. I have ME/CFS (much in common with long covid -- long covid sufferers and fellow invisible illness folks, I see you!), and I discovered about 15 years ago that certain chemicals -- synthetic musks and other fragrance fixatives -- are a major trigger for my health problems. The human scent world just keeps getting more intense each year, the fragrances louder and more sticky, and with each passing year the scope of public space available to me shrinks. When I think about what I love about cities, it's the dynamism and creativity especially around food and drink, the way strangers get knitted into each other’s lives through the commingling of public and private space. But I can’t regularly enjoy those things anymore. All it takes is a few people in a restaurant who use scent boosters or dryer sheets on their clothes to make eating indoors very taxing to my health, sometimes with an impact that lasts for days on end. It sucks! (When the pandemic hit, boy was I prepared.) I don’t post about this stuff, because I don’t want to make people feel bad about their personal choices, choices they probably don’t realize affect other people at all — but they do have a profound impact on me and on other people with chemical sensitivities, profound enough to make me need to leave my city.

We were in Vermont a few days ago, painting and cleaning in advance of the move, and driving back to Baltimore through Philly I found myself taking in the density of lights, feeling a pang of longing for cities and their energy, and mourning in advance the fact that I won’t be in a city anymore. I’m a city person at heart, I think. I had to remind myself, I can’t enjoy city things now, alas. So it’s time to make the best of the situation and indulge in my love of the intricacy of forests, to find community in part by eavesdropping on birds and seeing what the plants and critters are up to. I am so grateful for the support of my repeat customers, folks who have integrated my work into their daily rituals, some of you for years and years now — you make it possible for me to keep this business small, thoughtful, and sustainable, and you make it possible for me to take care of my health and my spirit by moving up to a kooky log house in the Green Mountains.

I’m so excited that my husband Brian will be helping me with the business now too, freeing me up a bit for creative projects. Expect more new work, more limited edition + experimental stuff, perhaps some actual posts on social media more than like twice per year! I’m going to actually write a newsletter for the first time ever — sign up via the link in profile — and I’m mulling over future projects like perhaps offering a low-key subscription, nothing too expensive, but it’ll be a way to offer special things to the people who have nurtured my business over the years.

Onward! May we all find ways to accommodate each other’s frailties and treat ourselves with the tenderness we deserve.

I wrote a short essay for my dear friends for the 2nd edition of 's letterpress broadside, Argot, published in December. This piece was an opportunity for me to distill some ideas about two topics that buzz around my head constantly these days -- smell, and the pandemic -- and though I'm late in posting it, the topic does seem to remain evergreen. This beautiful broadside includes a jaunty account of a lamb and bread soup by Will of and a tip of the hat (or the shoe?) to . Love you, ! And thanks, friends, for reading -- and please do share with anyone you know who has felt alone in suffering the loss of smell experiences of all sorts during the pandemic.  🙏🏽

I'm grateful to my community for keeping me very busy, despite the fact that I've been off social media! Does this mean that if you're a small business, maybe you don't need to keep feeding the beast? I don't know, but it's something to consider, especially if you think that social media is a generally pernicious force. But I really don't know! And I do feel sorry for missing people being kind to me on here. You all fill me up with your soulful feedback and I am so grateful, even though sometimes this gratitude looks like me hiding 🙈 because I get shy and overwhelmed and don't know how to respond.
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I'm basically caught up on orders now, so I can ship out those last few things lightning-quick. Orders placed by 9 pm EST Thursday 12/16 will ship via USPS on Friday 12/17, which is USPS's first class mail deadline. But please note that I absolutely cannot guarantee that orders shipped via USPS will arrive in time for Christmas, because of continuing system-wide problems at the postal service (we all deserve better, especially USPS employees!). I can ship via UPS ground within the continental US for an additional $10 -- see link in bio for that option -- this will be more reliable for Christmas delivery!
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If you are in Baltimore, feel free to order (via link in bio, no shipping fee), and we can coordinate a local pickup for this weekend.
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Take care of yourselves and those you love. Despite the fact that we are still in challenging times, I am genuinely excited for what 2022 will bring. Find that bit of hope in yourself and nurture it like a seedling!

Hushed scent. The first of a small line of unscented, essential-oil free products, aromatically quiet yet botanically thoughtful. Who is this for? It's for me and maybe you -- people who sometimes just can't handle sensory stimuli, whether because you have a headache or are in pain, or because you want to focus on the scent of a project you're working on (something you're cooking or a fragrance you're creating, or a dinner you're eating or cocktail you're sipping -- or a beach or forest or person you really want to smell in its pure state). For pregnant people, for people who've overdone essential oils and can't handle them anymore -- all kinds of people who have bodies and skin that thirst for loving care, but who may not tolerate scent.
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No essential oils or absolutes, so it's unscented in that sense. But because I use real ingredients, there’s a natural, very soft scent to the cream -- slight warmth of beeswax and coconut oil, tealike sparkle of blue cornflower, the creamy depths of nilotica shea and the slight chocolate fruit note of cupuacu butter. Nothing in the world is truly unscented, is it? (A little side rant: Have you ever bought "unscented" conventional deodorant and been like WTF is this fragrance I smell? The answer is that "unscented" products are allowed to use fragrance to “mask” the inherent unpleasant scents of the ingredients that form the functional body of the product, and yup that can include synthetic fragrance. Gotta read those labels, every time. And everything, including conventional cosmetic ingredients, has a smell. Behentrimonium methosulfate, the basis of just about every conditioner? 🐠🎣🐟) This product's inherent scents are creamy, mild, soft. I absolutely love the skinfeel of this product -- I’m proud of my creams, but I think I've leveled up with this one. Cloud Cream (unscented) is available now, and look for aromatic variations in the same luxe base (currently: Jasmine + Elderflower).

I'm back! Well, let's be honest, I will only ever be an occasional presence on social media (I gotta do me, apparently). But I have new goods (now mostly in the online shop), and I will be at for an in-person, masked, outdoor market this Sunday -- link in bio! In particular I'll have this sweet little Garden Rose + Water Mint body butter bar, a solid moisturizer that smells like all the brambly rose and herb garden dreams you might have had. I actually made this back in May but didn't get my act together to list it, and now we're in a strange moment where I don't feel comfortable shipping a melt-on-the-skin product like this in the heat of solstice summer -- so come see me on Sunday and grab one in person! I should be be posting a couple previews of more new things to come that you can get on Sunday, but no guarantees! Rest assured, they are in the online shop right now regardless. :) Thank you all for your support, for keeping me very busy, and for telling me in so many ways that my transmission into the universe through my work is being received. 🛰