My baby was two months old when the rash appeared around her neck.
Eczema. Raw and angry in the folds of skin where a baby’s chin meets her chest, in the place you kiss. I tried what you try. Nothing over the counter did anything, and the things that were supposed to work came in tubes with ingredient lists I could not pronounce, and I did not want to put them on a body that new.
So I called my grandmother.
I should tell you who she was, because she is the reason this company exists.
Mama Victoria raised me until I was eleven, in an adobe house in a rancho in the mountains of Mexico. She could not read or write. She raised twelve living children in a house with a leaky roof and no running water, and she cooked everything from nothing.
She was also an herbalist. She kept a garden and she knew what was in it — not decoratively, but the way a person knows a language. She talked to her plants. She sang to them. She taught us that we are all connected to them, and she said it plainly, the way you’d state a fact about the weather.
When I described the rash to her, she did not suggest a product.
She told me to take it back to the basics and make her a cream myself. Then she named a few herbs to infuse into it.
That was the beginning of Lesuif. A woman in her nineties who had never bought a jar of anything, telling her granddaughter to go make it.
I want to be honest about why that advice landed instead of sounding impossible.
I grew up on a farm where we could not afford to waste anything. Not food, not fabric, not the dry bean stalks after harvest. If we needed something, we generally made it, because that was cheaper than buying it and because that was simply what people did. I did not learn resourcefulness as a value. I learned it as a fact of the house.
So when my grandmother said make it yourself, I didn’t hear a lovely idea. I heard an instruction I already knew how to follow.
And there was the other half of it, which came from my mother — who loves skincare, and passed that on to both her daughters, and taught me that caring for your skin is not vanity. It’s care. There’s a difference.
Plants from my grandmother. Skin from my mother. Lesuif sits exactly where those two things meet, and I did not plan that. I only noticed it later.
I made the first batch in my kitchen.
Grass-fed, grass-finished tallow. Jojoba oil infused with herbs. That’s it — the same fat people have been putting on their skin for thousands of years, and plants, and time.
She was the first person on earth to use it.
Her rash cleared in three days.
I’m careful about the word healing, because I don’t think it’s mine to claim.
What I believe is this: our bodies are powerful. They are already doing the work. Most of the time they don’t need to be overridden — they need a little help, a nudge, something that supports what they’re already trying to do and doesn’t fight it.
That’s what I set out to make. Not a cure. A hand under the elbow.
After her, it was my husband. Then my mother. Then family, then friends, and then people I’d never met.
It is still made in my kitchen. By hand, in small batches, by me.
People sometimes ask when I’ll scale it, and I understand the question. But I make it by hand because it’s the only way I know how, and because I’ve come to think it’s the best way to take care of somebody. My grandmother never made a meal she didn’t touch with her own hands. Neither do I.
Everything in a Lesuif jar is as close to natural as I can get it, and that isn’t a marketing position. It’s what my ancestors used, because it was what there was. Mother Earth has already given us the answers. Most of what has happened since is packaging.
And I wanted to make something timeless.
Caring for your skin isn’t a trend. It’s the oldest kind of care there is — people have been rubbing fat and plants into their skin for as long as there have been people. Your skin is the largest organ you have and the first thing that touches the world.
That’s worth doing properly.
So: a baby with a rash, a grandmother who couldn’t read, a garden in the mountains, and a kitchen in Texas.
That’s the whole company.
And underneath all of it, the simplest thing in the world — a mother who would do anything for her child.
Every jar still starts there.
Con cariño, Abril