Since its foundation in early 2007, one thing remained clear, the By Valenti Organics brand needed to be animal friendly, as per our animal activist founder decision (that’s me), so no testing or animal ingredients were animals needed to die or suffer were to be used in any of my products. We decided beeswax and honey would be the only two ingredients used that come from animal sources, since bees are not harmed or killed to obtain these 2 precious ingredients… or so we thought.
Because bees are overworked, basically enslaved, even on organic bee farms (we didn’t know!), not to mention they are suffering a great deal, we decided to remove these ingredients from all our products and find the natural replacements for the honey and beeswax bees graciously, in normal & natural conditions that is, provide to us. Bees do way more than just provide us with honey and wax, without them many of the fruits and vegetables we know and consume on a daily basis wouldn’t exist as these little guys pollinate the plants responsible to provide you from the tomatoes in your salad all the way to the pecans in your pie. Although bees are not native of the Americas, we need them to literally keep food on the table. Protecting our nature is our responsibility.
Soon we found ourselves looking at our marvelous world with a different lens.
Everything we need to survive and even to pamper ourselves is found in nature without the need for it to be derived from the animal world, and this has been the foundation of By Valenti Organics since its conception. For almost every animal derived ingredient there is a vegetable ingredient many times even better than the animal counterpart. Of course, we make sure every vegetable ingredient we get comes from organic renewable sustainable resources, as the last thing we as humans want is to keep harming the environment and potentially destroy our own ecosystem, or else we’re doomed.
We found that Candelilla Wax has the same properties of Bees Wax, so that was a really easy replacement, but with the honey we found ourselves scratching our heads. Honey is more than just a sweetener, it’s a super food and it contains invaluable properties than just plain sugar. In cosmetics, honey is used for its antimicrobial, rejuvenating and conditioning properties. In medicine it has a long history in the treatment of many conditions, from skin illness, to throat, cough and stomach problems all the way to treat ulcers and colitis. As a teenager I used it topically to treat my severe acne condition, as prescribed by my lovely mother, who introduced me to the benefits of natural medicine from an early age.
At By Valenti Organics, we use raw organic honey in many of our products, particularly in the making of many of our Bath Bombs, for its conditioning, rejuvenating and antimicrobial properties, so how do we find a substitute for this super food?! Googling for the answer, we found every recipe, website and blog said to substitute it for sugar and water. If you’re looking to substitute this ingredient for only its sweetness in your cooking recipe, then yes, any sugar would do, but for us, this super food is much more than just sweet. We needed to find a substitute that would have the same or very similar properties than honey and that would be plant derived, and we found it!
The counterpart of the super food Honey is the super food Maple Syrup. Maple syrup, just like honey contains high levels of anti-oxidants and anti-microbial properties, similar to honey, but it also contains 4 important ingredients, potassium, calcium, zinc and magnesium among many others. It has also a long history in Native American medicine, and was used mixed with leeks as a cough medicine. Resent studies have shown pure Maple Syrup, aside from its high nutritional value, has anticancer, antibacterial and anti-diabetic properties.
We’re already making all the necessary changes to substitute honey and beeswax for maple syrup and candelilla wax in all our products, and soon we will be launching on our website, becoming By Valenti Organics a 100% Vegan company.
Manuela Valenti
CEO/Founder
By Valenti Organics
Luxurious & Exotic Organic Skin Care
While creating my line of skin care products the need for a realistic expiration date, since we don’t use any preservatives or chemicals in the making of my products, needed to be in place. We simply started adding the expiration date on the label, not too pretty and it truly looked like a medicine of some sort, so we removed it.
Someone in my team suggested we use the open jar system, which is basically the drawing of an opened jar with a number next to a capital M which translates into the number of months the product would expire after opened. This seemed like a viable solution yet it presented a set of problems, for me at least.
Using the opened jar system meant inevitably the product would need to contain artificial preservatives, since there was no way to determine how long would the product remain active while on a store shelf before purchase. The opened jar/month system tells the consumer the product needs to be fully used or discarded 3-6-12-24 months (3M, 6M, 12M, 24M) after the product was opened. This means the product needs to be kept active for whatever amount of months the product remains on the store shelves. This method in my opinion completely disqualifies the use of the word Organic Skin Care.
Organic and Natural Skin Care by definition means no added artificial preservatives or chemicals to prolong the shelf life of the product. Since no artificial ingredients are added only natural organic preservatives should be used, the reason why so many natural organic skin care brands aren’t what they claim they are. These natural preservatives also have an expiration period, therefore a product with a opened jar expiration date of 3M (3 months) that will remain in a store shelf for 3 months before being purchased could possibly have expired already at the moment of use, or the product might not be as effective as if it was used within the first 3 months after the product was made.
Back to the drawing board and with our thinking hats on, we decided a different approach. We had to have an expiration date, no doubt about it, it is very important for me to show consumers our products are made fresh and that above everything we don’t use artificial preservatives to prolong the shelf life of the product, but making it look nice and not medicine like was a little challenging. As my immediate roots are Italian we decided on an Italian word “Freschezza” /fres’kɛttsa/ which means “freshness”. The logo of By Valenti Organics is a drop with a lavender flower in the center, as that was the first ingredient we used. So combining the drop a little bit of imagination, and some color, the Freschezza logo of By Valenti logo of freshness was born.
The Freschezza logo which is found on each and everyone of our products displays two important pieces of information, the expiration date in which the product expires or remains to its full potency and the lot number.
Even though our products are natural, made with USDA certified organic ingredients and don’t contain any weird unpronounceable chemicals for real now you can use our products with confidence, knowing using them before the expiration date you’ll be benefiting from all the goodness of nature in its full potency.
In preparation for our USDA Certification we’ve proudly changed “The Candy for your Skin” for “Organics” in all our logos.
You already know By Valenti is symbol of quality and integrity. If we say we only use USDA Certified Organic Vegetable Ingredients you bet that’s what we put in all our products.
In the next few weeks we’ll slowly switch all our labels to the new ones displaying “Organics” next to By Valenti.
That doesn’t mean we no longer are The Candy for your Skin ;o)
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The By Valenti family wants to wish you all a
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Holidays!!
As a thank you for your continued support, for a wonderful 2010 and for welcoming us into your home,
use this coupon code for 10% OFF on your next online order.
Enter HAPPY2011 during Checkout! (expires 12/31/10 at midnight EST)
Happy Holidays! we’ll see you in 2011!!!
*By Valenti will close its doors 12/24 and we’ll be back 01/03/2011.
