About This Journal

Welcome to the Four Roots Journal

There's a place on St. Croix where the rainforest runs down to meet the Caribbean Sea. That's where I make the balm — by hand, in small batches, in a house my husband and I found abandoned and spent ten years bringing back to life. We call it North Star Villa. It's where this whole story lives. And now it's where this journal begins.

I'm Barby. I was born and raised on this island, surrounded by farming. My grandparents worked alongside a local dairy family. My husband, Jonathan, raises heritage cattle just up the road. For most of my life, I didn't think much about skincare at all.

Then one morning, I stood in front of a shelf holding twelve different products and realized I couldn't tell you what half of them were for.

So I made one thing instead.

One jar. Fourteen ingredients I can name, each one there for a reason. No water. No fillers. Nothing I couldn't trace back to a farm down the road or a plant I trust. Grass-fed tallow from our own cattle. Jojoba I macerate here, slowly, with calendula and chamomile and rose. Beeswax from our hives. That's the balm. That's the whole idea.

This journal is the rest of that story.

What you'll find here

The name comes from my four grandchildren — Esmeralda Rose, Sophie Antonia, Javi (Javier Dean), and Kai Hollis. Four roots. It felt right, because everything I make is an attempt to get back to the root of things: fewer ingredients, better ones, and the patience to do it by hand.

That's what I want to write about here, too.

Some entries will be about the ingredients — what grass-fed tallow actually is, why a waterless balm behaves so differently from the lotions you're used to, what "anhydrous" means and why it matters for your skin. I'll explain the science the way I wish someone had explained it to me: plainly, honestly, without the hype.

Other entries will be about the place. The rendering. The cattle. A day of pouring when the trade winds are up. The island that shapes all of it.

And some will just be about the slower way of doing things — the belief, quietly unfashionable, that you don't need twelve steps and a cabinet full of jars. That one good thing, made with care, can be enough.

A quiet promise

I'll never tell you something here that I can't stand behind. I'm an organic skincare formulator, and I take that seriously — so when I describe what an ingredient does, it'll be accurate, and I'll never dress up a balm as something it isn't. This is skincare, made thoughtfully. Nothing more, and nothing less.

Mostly, I want this to feel like a letter from St. Croix. Something you can read with your coffee. A window into what's actually in the jar, and the hands that filled it.

I'm so glad you're here. Pull up a chair.

Come see what's in the balm, or how it's made, from pasture to jar.

— Barby