By Regina Weinreich
Lori MacGarva glows as she talks about her company, Hamptons Aromatherapy, and it’s not only because she’s bathed in her signature Golden Oil. At the recent Purist Health Fair in Southampton, surrounded by fans of her massage butters, sea salt scrubs, hydrosols and lip balms, she beams with pride, speaking about her products’ origin story, from farm and sea to body.
“We cook our own plant material for four to six hours for one batch, giving us maybe 5 gallons,” says MacGarva. “We don’t just add water. We take our plant materials and incorporate that into our products.” While other brands simply add drops of essential oil into distilled water, “we get the pure essence of plants by cooking them,” says MacGarva. “The chemical compounds of the plant come through the water. That is actually why I became obsessed with this. Each property that a plant can offer you is enormous. Lavender for calming. Rose for anxiety. Geraniums, seaweed, we have a term called CAKE—vitamins C, A, K, E. If you go back to medieval times, everything was cured by plants. We have to get back to using more plants for our bodies.”
Prior to moving back to East Hampton, where her family lives, MacGarva worked in the fitness industry. A professional dancer, she taught exercise for Gilda Marx, Jane Fonda and Lucille Roberts. She opened a studio, Physical Attraction. For 15 years, she says, “I exercised some of the most amazing people who came to this community.”
In the ’80s, she met a woman who introduced her to essential oils, when few were into the practice of aromatherapy. She created a body oil, to this day her go-to for relaxation after a hot shower. If alchemy can be defined as distilling baser metals into gold, Golden Oil is the perfect name for the balm that started her off in this homegrown enterprise.
Needing more space for their expanding vision, she and six others recently bought an old duck farm in Eastport. Each works in either aquaculture or agriculture; her aromatherapy will be based here, plus, there’s a beekeeper, a grapeseed oil maker, and two baymen working with oysters and kelp, and her niece is experimenting with creating fabric out of oyster shells and kelp. Even Hamptons Aromatherapy’s bags are made with repurposed ocean plastic.
“We bought this farm collaboratively so all these young people can have an opportunity to do what they want to pursue—agriculture and aquaculture,” says MacGarva. “The town of Southampton has been an amazing support in the interest of preserving and encouraging us with the use of this farm.” It’s part of an industry out east that includes such locales as Amber Waves, Quail Hill and others, holding development at bay. hamptonsaromatherapy.com