Yesterday, I posted this status on Facebook: “For many years I have resisted selling my products in my writing, believing that it would somehow confuse the message and reduce the education about love to advertising. I am ending my silence today. For as much as I have come to understand about the relational quality of loving that makes sex true and amazing, I learned these things through Good Clean Love – our products do create real sexual healing and that’s the truth.”
This feels like starting a new chapter, or even like a change in religion. I have always been so concerned about diluting the important message of relational love that I have left my products as orphans. I never promote my work as an entrepreneur or love product connoisseur. I never talk about why we produce the kind of products we do unless I am doing a sales training. Even then, it is more about education than it is about taking the space that I have earned over the years as a green formulator of the best love products on the market.
I have read before that all of the most influential companies create solutions that respond to the maxim, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Good Clean Love was birthed from that place. After bearing and nursing four babies for a total of 12 years, my interior landscape was as dry as a desert. As for millions of other women, vaginal dryness is one leg of a triad of symptoms that end up in pain with sex. Not finding desire a companion anymore and unable to wake up any libido is either a consequence or an instigator or both. It doesn’t really matter where the cycle starts and ends.
For an alarming number of women and couples it is the syndrome that eventually ends their sex life. I was lucky enough to be sexually responsive for most of my life, so I wasn’t going to give up on my sex life that easily. I imagine, if orgasm was as elusive for me as it is for up to 40% of women, I might not have tried so hard to find a solution. After four kids I knew how vital our sex life was to the working of the family. I had grown up in a violent messy divorce and I was intent on not repeating my past.
A beautiful and happy accident occurred in my search for a solution when I came across a single bottle of love oil in a metaphysical shop that has since gone under. I bought the stuff and spent the next 6 months enjoying some of the best sex of my marriage. I thought it was us… I thought we had hit a new level together until the bottle ran out. Then I learned the power of love oil. After a year of unfruitful searching for another bottle or a close substitute, I finally found the woman who made that bottle with a kit of 10-year-old essential oils. Thus began my quest and the beginning of Good Clean Love.
Interestingly, though it has not been our initial product inspiration that has grown the company. The sexual product market is a challenging one to innovate. It is referred to as segmented because the same products have controlled the shelf space since I was 8- -years-old. Advertising and sales of intimacy aids are all about personal lubricant. Johnson and Johnson has spent more than 100 million dollars over the last several years normalizing the use of lubricants. Now most everyone has bought a bottle of lubricant, the majority made with nasty, carcinogenic ingredients.
It was one of our earliest multi-store customers that implored me to come up with a water-based lubricant product. It took more than a year of kitchen experimentation and collaboration with an out-of-the-box thinking contract manufacturer for us to come up with our first marketable lubricant. We made our first product with tea infused scents, a cocktail of tiny percentages of preservatives and a new clear gum, seaweed and aloe. The gel held the color of the tea water. One preservative ingredient was a milk enzyme. Some people loved it and some complained. Welcome to the world of consumer products.
We are currently in our third cycle of lubricant evolution. In this continuous improvement process we are always looking for new and better preservatives, cleaner distilled flavors and new healing ingredients. This is one of the most challenging and exciting parts of a love product company inventing products that can change your sex life and your overall health.
A sex life is actually a fairly accurate reflection of your overall health. Hundreds of studies link a satisfying sex life with reduced stress, illness and depression. Sexual activity is even associated with longevity. Our sense of smell is one of our most neglected, yet rooted sources of information. Considering how you know someone or something with your nose, how their smell affected you, is what love oil helps you to do.
Love oil, by its nature is a sensuous commodity. It is most useful when you rub it lovingly on someone else. So the scent becomes part of how skin feels. Touch is a mysterious language with few words that accurately contain its meaning. Combining scented oil with the perfection of naked skin is what erotica was built on.
My husband, Franc, coined the term “smoking me/you” about the manner of inhaling your lover’s scent; coming close enough to kiss, but just breathing. This is where scent penetrates deeper than conscious thoughts- with a trigger as small as mindful focus on what we smell. Something in your limbic brain fires a fast burst of neuron activity and suddenly your sex drive is on. It’s as easy as flicking a switch and sometimes as impossible to find in the dark of night.
Our love oil scents are exotic and erotic combinations from across the globe. Some of the oldest recorded aphrodisiac oils that have been revered for centuries and, at times, more valuable than gold for their arousing properties. Each of our scents combines the sensuous history of faraway lands and exotic aromas into an expanded mental space, a modern consciousness of love rooted in the idyllic moments of perfect history.
Kissing with love oil turns a regular kiss into a conversation. Scent enlarges the sensory experience ten fold or more. Lips, tongue, breathe are all altered within the shadow of aroma. So for a special Valentine’s gift to my most devoted readers a private coupon to get one of our new aluminum, perfect dispensing, lovely-to-hold-next-to-someone-you-love bottles of love oil for only $10. This will not happen again soon. Make up your own love oil stories that I promise will be some of your most treasured memories. Happy Valentine’s Day.
