The study of ethnobotany leads to a career in skincare rooted in nature
Biophilia Botanicals, an artisan cosmetics line, opens a practice on South Main Street
You may have met Alice Duvernell at the Biophilia Botanicals booth at the Sebastopol Farmer’s Market, where she’s been selling her handmade botanical cosmetics for the last three or four years. In November, she opened a new, appointment-only shop and laboratory at 489 S. Main Street in Sebastopol.
Duvernell was born in France and raised in Paris, where she studied sociology and anthropology at the Sorbonne. Her anthropological interests led her to ethnobotany, in which she ultimately got her Master’s.
“For many years, I worked with universities abroad, like in Brazil, where I studied the chemistry and the phytochemistry of plants, and what they could do for people internally and psychologically. And I loved it, but during that journey, I started having really bad skin problems. I had really severe adult acne, and my whole focus on botanicals shifted to skincare.”
“I started studying skincare, and I traveled around the world,” she said, “and I was like, ‘Oh, my dream is to create a really clean skincare line,’” based on her botanical studies.
Life does not run in a straight line, however, and somewhere between college and founding Biophilia Botanicals, she learned the craft of gilding. “When I stopped my studies in ethnobotany, I became a gilder, which is a person that restores old gold furniture of the 17th and 18th century. There’s also architectural gilding that’s a little different, but it’s in the same vein. I worked for seven years with incredible master in the south of France that taught me ancient gilding, like from the Middle Ages. I learned about glues and emulsifiers and how to make them from garlic and fish skin and bunny skin and all these really weird things. My last job was for Versailles. That’s one of the biggest gilding castles of France.”
Ultimately, she married an American and moved to Northern California.
“I was used to emulsifying, blending, observing, so when I got back into cosmetics, my love of food and cooking and my knowledge of the chemistry of paint and emulsifications and glues kind of collided together—and then my knowledge of plants and chemistry came in as well.”
At first, she just made things for her friends and family, hand-making custom cosmetic formulas to deal with various skin types and issues.
“Then at some point in my career, I lost a job. I was a little bit distressed, and I was like, ‘What am I going to do?’” she said. “And my friends and family said, ‘You have to sell your formulas. They’re so amazing!’ So I gathered all of the formulas that I had been doing for the love of people and family, and I put them in jars.”
She started Biophilia Botanicals about 15 years ago in Marin County. Good Earth Natural Food Stores in Fairfax and Mill Valley were her first big wholesale customers.
“It was a huge moment for me,” she said. “And then I just continued doing the product line, and I continued also consulting.”
She had a by-appointment-only lab in San Rafael for several years, but when COVID hit, she closed that and moved everything to her home in Petaluma.
Asked why she decided to open her new shop in Sebastopol, she said, “I chose Sebastopol because I feel people really understand what I do here. We’ve been doing the farmers market here, and we have an incredible following, and people love what we do…so there’s just this, I think, acknowledgement of what I do here. It’s a community that’s educated and that’s looking for natural solutions, and the people here are just really lovely.”
Her best-selling products are a tinted moisturizer called “Earth Elements,” a skin supplement called “Time Machine,’ and a face cream called “Solstice.” But these are just a few of her extensive line of products. She also makes custom formulations of skincare products—and even perfumes.
The ingredients are locally sourced. “We work with a farm in Bloomfield, two farms in Healdsburg and another farm in Geyserville,” she said.
“When people are using skincare that’s medicinal, they see their skin not just beautify, but they see healing,” she said. “They see improvement. That’s really the goal of Biophilia, is to not just provide cosmetics, but to provide topicals that make us feel good and that help our body heal.”
Duvernell sees her space less as a shop as more as a teaching space. She gives private consultations where she teaches people how to care for their skin, and she also plans to hold classes here as well, including classes for children.
“Initially Biophilia Botanicals was really about educating people on how to make their own skincare and how to take care of themselves, nutritionally and all of that, from the garden or the farm to the jar or the plate. “That was the initial energy.”
Duvernell will be collaborating with Ayurvedic practitioner DeAnna Batdorff (formerly of the dhyana Center on Main Street and now the owner of Dhyana Essentials) to offer an open community clinic on Saturday, Jan. 24. “It’s going to be donation based, which is really nice, meaning it’s open to everyone, even the ones that don’t have the means.”
Learn more at biophiliabotanicals.com or reach out to Alice at biophiliateam@gmail.com.
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