Your skin is always working—even when you never have to think about it.
It continually renews and repairs the barrier that helps protect the body from the outside world. It coordinates inflammatory signals in response to irritation and injury. And it exists alongside a living microbiome that plays a large role in how the skin functions, responds, and recovers.
These are only a few of the skin’s many functions, but they became the foundation of how I came to understand sensitive skin—and eventually, how I built Persephone Apothecary.
So much skincare focuses on changing the surface: cleansing more deeply, exfoliating more aggressively, or adding another active ingredient, but when skin is already reactive, more intervention can leave it feeling even further from equilibrium.
Persephone was created from a different question: What if skincare did less to the skin and offered more support for the work it was already trying to do?
This is how I arrived there.
I didn’t set out to formulate skincare. I set out to understand why my skin was so reactive—and why nothing I tried seemed to help.
For years, it felt like my skin reacted to everything. I eliminated fragrance, the first thing everyone tells you to do. But I was still living with chronic hives, raw, broken skin, and puffiness that never fully settled. I simplified my routine again and again, only to find essential oils hiding in so many of the products marketed as “natural” and “gentle.” They may have been plant-derived, but they were still far too concentrated for my skin to tolerate.
I wasn’t looking for a miracle. I wanted something that wouldn’t make my skin feel worse—something simple, gentle, and genuinely soothing. When I couldn’t find it, I began making it.
I began where I always begin: with research.
That research led me first to jojoba—not technically an oil, but a liquid wax whose structure resembles the wax esters naturally found in human sebum. It offered a simple, stable foundation for carrying the plant constituents I wanted to work with. Then came calendula, traditionally used to soothe irritated skin and support its natural repair process. Chamomile followed, chosen for skin caught in cycles of redness and reactivity. And finally plantain, for the tender, lingering stage after a reaction—when the flare had passed, but my skin still struggled to recover.
Each ingredient answered a different part of what my skin had been asking for.
Somewhere along the way, I realized I was no longer just researching ingredients or studying formulation. I was learning the plants themselves—living beings with their own histories, adaptations, and ways of moving through the world. For millennia, humans have turned to plants for food, shelter, medicine, and breath. They are not separate from human life. They are what make it possible.
I started expanding my garden to learn how these plants grow and move through their life cycles. I found myself walking through my local park differently too, stopping to identify what was growing, where it came from, and how it interacted with the body.
As a nurse, I'd spent years studying how the body communicates, how disease unfolds in patterns, and how healing moves through systems. I found myself bringing that same curiosity to the living world around me, asking what these plants were doing, how their chemistry intersected with human physiology, and why generations of people had reached for them long before any of it could be explained in a lab.
This is also where I learned that medicine starts in the ground, and that the ground is never without history.
Persephone Apothecary is made in Los Angeles, within Tovaangar, the traditional homelands of the Tongva people. Working responsibly with plants means recognizing the Tongva people’s continued presence and supporting Tongva-led stewardship of this land.
A plant’s chemistry is shaped not only by its genetics, but by its relationships. Soil organisms, growing conditions, environmental stress, and the plant’s own defenses can all influence the secondary metabolites it produces—including the flavonoids, resins, and aromatic compounds that provide value in whole-plant preparations.
That is why we source Persephone’s herbs from regenerative farms. It is a values decision, but it is also a quality decision: a commitment to plants grown in living soil, within systems designed to protect and restore the land. Whenever possible, the other ingredients in our formulas are sourced organically to limit exposure to many of the synthetic pesticides used in conventional agriculture.
What changed most through this process wasn't just the creation of these products. It was my thinking. I stopped approaching my skin as a problem to fix and started approaching it as a living system to support. I also stopped looking for the ingredient that would make the reactivity stop and started asking what my skin actually needed to do its own mending work more easily.
That's what the Sensitive Skin System is made for. Not a cure, not a protocol, but a set of tools built to support what your body already knows how to do. One daily ritual that works with your barrier, your inflammation response, and your microbiome.
With much warmth,
Bethany
Tell your plants I say hi. 🌿
