Rosa y Fruta for Your Face

Looking youthful is a time-consuming, cupboard-hogging, expensive regimen to keep, and anyone whose beauty regime features myriad creams, cleansers, toners, firmers, exfoliators, and brighteners would certainly welcome a less-is-more alternative. Seeking to fill that void is Santa Barbara’s Elizabeth O’Rourke, whose new line of skin care products is called Rosa y Fruta.

“What makes the line so great is that it is four products that do everything,” O’Rourke said. “As a woman, you need a toner, and then you need a moisturizer, and then you need an under-eye cream, and then you need a serum. It goes on and on until you have 15 to 20 products on your counter. It’s complicated and, actually, too much on the skin can create sensitivities. So I wanted to make something really powerful that is anti-aging and rejuvenating and nourishing, but simple.”

Rosa y Fruta began evolving more than 10 years ago thanks to her experimentation with organic botanic ingredients. “I was in graduate school studying expressive arts therapy,” she explained. “I had a passion for organics and nutrition; I was just being girly and whipping [lotions] up. I remember cracking open coconuts, putting them in the blender with mango, and studying ancient [beauty] traditions. I created things in my kitchen, and little by little, friends started saying, ‘Will you whip me some up?’ So I had to learn the fine art of preservation. I spent years studying skin chemistry with a cosmetic chemist. That’s how the company started. It was just out of passion and love for ingredients and beauty.”

Keeping with her love of natural potions, the Rosa y Fruta four-product line is made from plant derivatives, such as white camellia and rose oil, pomegranate seed nectar, green tea, and shea butter. The cleanser (Camellia Blanca) is predominately white camellia oil meant to clean without stripping the skin; the face and eye cream (Lustre Exotica) boasts green tea, shea butter, and Mediterranean olive anti-aging actives; the face and eye night serum (Nectar de Pasion) combines sea kelp with the plant growth hormone Kinetin for skin repair; and the face mask and scrub (Ambrosia de Rosa) incorporates rose jojoba beads, white willow bark extract, and oil distilled from a rare rose in India, acting as an exfoliant, “which is essential for healthy, beautiful skin,” said O’Rourke.

For now, Rosa y Fruta is an online company, but O’Rourke is all for making her product available at area stores. “That’s why Tobey is here,” she said of her business partner Tobey Terry. “I was mainly a mad scientist, loving what I was doing, but I wasn’t much of a marketer. It was all word of mouth. But [Tobey] is the go-getter. She is just amazing, and she wants to get it out there, and I’m all for that.”

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To order Rosa y Fruta products, visit rosayfruta.com.