There is a word in Portuguese that has no direct translation in English. Saudade (Sow-DAH-jee). It means the longing for something you love that is no longer there. That feeling is why Terra Sol exists.
I grew up in Brazil where natural skincare was never complicated. Buriti oil from the Cerrado palm. Cupuaçu butter from the Amazon rainforest. Maracujá from the passion fruit vine. Babassu starch from the palm. Real ingredients that my mother and grandmother trusted for generations. Nobody read labels because there was nothing to question.
Twenty years later, every ingredient I put on my face has a name I cannot pronounce.
For years I searched American stores for the Brazilian botanicals I grew up with. Occasionally I would find a moisturizer with Cupuaçu butter buried in the ingredient list. But right alongside were synthetic preservatives, emulsifiers, parabens, and chemicals I had never heard of. These products that claimed to be natural skincare but were anything but.
The saudade for those simple Brazilian ingredients never left me. And it collided with something else that was quietly happening in our home.
Over the last couple of years Cole and I began quietly cleaning up our lives. Better food. Better products. Better ingredients. It started at the grocery store and slowly made its way to every shelf in our home.
The turning point came when Cole picked up my moisturizer one evening and started reading the back the same way he had been reading food labels for months. Same chemicals. Different bottle. Parabens. Synthetic fragrance hiding behind the word parfum. Dimethicone. PEGs. Phenoxyethanol. We had been so focused on cleaning up what we ate that we had never stopped to think about what we were absorbing through our skin every single day.
What he found when he started researching how these chemicals behave in the body made the decision for us. We needed a change.
I already knew what clean skincare looked like. I had grown up with it.
We wanted a natural skin balm made with ingredients we could trace back to the earth. Grass-fed tallow for its skin-identical fatty acids and fat-soluble vitamins. Cupuaçu butter and buriti oil from Brazil for deep hydration and natural skin nourishment. Maracujá oil. Babassu starch. Non-nano zinc oxide for mineral skin barrier support against the heat, and outside elements. No synthetic preservatives. No parabens. No fragrance. Nothing we could not explain.
We could not find that product anywhere. So we decided to make it ourselves.
That is how Terra Sol was born. And from it, Balm do Sol, a small batch natural skin balm handmade in our kitchen in Ashburn, Virginia using Brazilian botanicals and grass-fed tallow with no harmful chemicals.
Every jar is made by hand in small batches by Mariana and Cole. If you have been reading labels and feeling that same frustration, you are in the right place.
Pele viva. Skin alive.
Mariana and Cole Freeman, Terra Sol