The History of Ghastly Good

It is our pledge to use all organic ingredients, in their purest form, including: Organic cold-pressed and a few essential oils and additive-free/Carrageenan-free Pure Aloe Vera.  The herbs, flowers, berries and citrus are hand-picked or are prepared from trusted and certified organic companies for the purposes of healing skin ailments and to get rid of wrinkles and acne.  

We also pledge never to use emulsifiers, imitation fragrances, parabens or any synthetic chemicals or preservatives that interfere with hormones, contribute to forming cancer or just plain age your skin in the long-run. We rely on the vinegar, citrus and your care of it, to preserve our tonics! 

Miracle Facial Tonic is handmade and every batch is personally tested and used by the maker. For more information, click on "Shop".

I developed the Miracle Facial Tonic line because of what I learned about beauty products and how to care for your skin from modeling school. Things seemed foreign to me in comparison to what mom had always done.

It was a wonder to me how new, man-made things, could possibly be better than nature. Turns out, they aren't and more are getting banned every day...

I thought, “Ingredients have to come from nature or how could they make something up that wasn’t from earth”? The answer is in the processes that labs have.  To create a chemical, they mix and match plants, etc. and change the molecular structure… Making them unknown to our bodies and unable or difficult to breakdown or utilize, causing all sorts of havoc! 

Cosmetic companies also use things that are greasy like wax or petroleum-based products. We read today that petroleum-based products give an instant softness, but creates long-term damage to the lower layers of our skin… Oh, and don't forget how these two ingredients plugs your pores so they cannot absorb nutrients from the air or make their own oils...

I thought, “How awful! There has to be a better way than this”! I asked my mom about how they took care of their hygiene without running water. My mom told me that her family used to capture rain water or snow then mix it with homemade cold-pressed oils and vinegar and how they would shine and look so healthy. 

After I heard this, I bought a little French book about the old ways of bathing and it was just what my mom had said! 

This also adding to the herbal research that I had been doing for years already (as I had been researching how to make herbal teas for years at that time. Now, I am in a Master Herbalist Program, which I LOVE!)

See, my great grand-parents immigrated here from Eastern Europe and some specifically from the Carpathian Mountains in Bucovina, which is split between Romania and Ukraine today. Being a mountain dwelling family, they learned how to care for themselves from nature and passed some of that knowledge down to us. My great-grandma was even the town healer in northern Minnesota! 

I fully believe that our bodies can heal themselves if taken care of properly with nutrition, stress management and exercise. Then, I wondered, “How can we do that for our skin”?  I wanted to create a well-rounded super-food for our skin so that it could heal itself! 

In 2010 I added organic cold-pressed oils to my tonic and fell in Love! They are made with temperatures less than 90 degrees, so they contain most all of their micronutrients. They are a mild but powerful way to deliver nutrients from nature to our skin that our bodies understand and are exactly what I needed for Miracle Facial Tonic ~ what I call “Skin Food”!

Steeping my tonic was the easiest thing to learn and it was like making cold-tea right out of my garden and the forest, the hard part was researching which ingredients to steep in it. I did figure it out with years of trial and error and everyone is so pleased.

Finding the right organic Aloe Vera to use was a bigger issue than I thought!  All organic Aloe-Vera is not created equal! You must use Carrageenan-Free Aloe Vera.

For the next 7 years, I kept researching and cross-referencing herbal healing with herbal studies from the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic’s. I chose the most proven oils to use in my tonic. Eventually, I perfected the ratios, creating what I feel, is the perfect formula, with my favorite ingredients to feed our skin! Then, I made one for several skin types!

I made it available to the public in 2017 after my friends and family hounded me enough to "get it out there". 

So, after that, I went with my 82 year-old dad, who is a wildlife artist, to an art show to help him set up and tear down and decided to get a booth of my own next to him. We had so much fun, especially at the German Fest in Otsego where we Polka danced most of the day instead of selling stuff! LOL I kept going to shows with him and now I go on my own as well as with him :)

I decided to brand Ghastly Good, so I drew the logo to reflect a lot of the ingredients in the tonic and now I keep trying to figure out how to let people know about this wonderful product and someday, I hope to have this be my FT job, as I am an accountant during the day and all I want to do is be in the outdoors.

The rest is history!

Thank you for learning about me and Ghastly Good, LLC!   

Love, Tara