HATTIE: The mission?

DONNA: The mission of the business? . . . that's inspired by the cowgirl.

And the mission is truly to bring awareness about natural skin-care products to people through education and through the joy of using them, let people understand what plants really can do for their bodies.

HATTIE: OK. You have been studying what plants can do for our bodies for a long time.

When was there a light bulb that went on in your head and said, `The product isn't there, I need to make it'?

DONNA: Well, I like to say to people that my whole life ended up in a two-ounce bottle of Cowgirl Cream. A lot of things I did from early on, from just keeping a little garden with my family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and growing up with a lot of beauty.

My mother was very inspiring and we had a lot of flowers. She was always framing covers of magazines, another Renoir or, `This is a Monet.' I just had a lot of beauty around me.

I ended up taking off in the early '70s, and went to Europe and ended up in India.

And, that was a first light bulb in my head.

I started to understand how people used the very plants that grow around them as their medicine and for beauty. I watched women comb coconut oil into their hair. Pretty soon we were doing that. And I stayed there for over a year studying, learning and did a lot of the paths of teachers and dance and whatever. But traveled to other countries, ended up in South America and, again, saw the same thing.

People use what grows very close to them for their medicine, of course, their food, which many people say is the same thing, and for their beauty.

And then I ended up back in Miami, Florida. I had family there and I got there and needed a job. I needed to dig back into real life. And I worked for a plastic surgeon in Miami, who turned out to be a wonderful mentor to me. He was the brother I never had in my life, taught me, really allowed me to grow as a person.

I probably was the first paramedical makeup artist in Miami in the early '70s.

HATTIE: What's a paramedical makeup artist?

DONNA: Well, paramedical makeup is makeup which enhances bad medical conditions, basically. People who've had burns, who've had terrible scarring from accidents, and you use makeup as a way to alleviate that.

And so I learned about the body now. I learned about how the body healed. So when we moved to Boulder, Colorado, from Miami, it was a totally different life. Boulder is very much--people used to call it `the granola city.' It's come a long way since I first got here. You can actually paint your nails and wear lipstick here now.

It was different then.

Yes. But, you know, it's the aging of women of my age, sort of a transition over the last 20-something years. And when I got here, I was raising two small children, wanted to get back into studying again, and I found some fabulous teachers.

One thing Boulder has is a wonderful network of people who are in alternative therapies. So I started teaching classes in how to make your own cosmetics . . . how to take some yogurt and put in egg yolk and drop in a couple of drops of lavender and you have a mask. It is really using food for the skin. The whole skin-care industry and beauty business, so to speak, started in the kitchen. After women made their candles, their soaps, their cough syrups and put up their preserves for the winter, they might have some time left over to take chamomile and infuse it in some olive oil.

Here in Colorado, they would've found some horsetail (or bottle brush) and infused that even in lard.

HATTIE: What do you get when you put bottle brush in oil?

DONNA: Well, it extracts the silicas and the constituents and that is really good for wound healing. You could take aloe vera and or sunflower oil and you might add a little bit of the lavender from your garden, and then you have a beautiful, natural oil for the skin. So, at one time, this is what people did in their kitchens.

HATTIE: You said, `My whole life is in this two-ounce bottle that I'm making today,' and I couldn't agree with you more. I mean, that's absolutely right. And we all are that way. When did you day to yourself, `I'm going to be a business person. I'm going to start a business. I'm going to make a product. I'm going for it.' When was that?

DONNA: Well, a lightbulb went off when we were taking a family vacation and we were driving back from Oregon. And I started really saying to myself, `What the heck did people put on their skin?'

And I thought a lot about native people, the indigenous women, the pioneer women, cowgirls riding those horses, getting out in the bleak winters and also just those rough summers. What did they do? And I thought a lot about the plants grow in the West.

And I thought, `You know, they are really things that heal the skin.'

And a lightbulb went off in my head. And I thought, `Cowgirl Cream.'