Blending a passion for healthy living with a love for nature, Maplewood resident Jamie Tatreau is redefining the beauty industry with her clean beauty product company, Sweet Mana. With her line of natural botanical skin care and apothecary products, Tatreau hopes to make it possible to look and feel beautiful without negatively impacting the planet.
“My whole mission is centered around making people feel healthy and beautiful and trying to educate as well,” Tatreau says.
Mana is a sacred term in Polynesian culture that signifies a life force or a soul’s essence, along with divine power and strength. Tatreau is looking to bring this vital energy to the lives of her customers by crafting products that are effective, affordable and clean for the mind, body and planet.
Crafted from all-natural ingredients, including herbs from her own garden, her line features a variety of regular and CBD-infused lip balms, body butters, candles, aromatic sprays, bath teas and lotion bars. The ritual of creating everything by hand is important to Tatreau. She says the process brings her a sense of peace, and she finds great joy in experimenting with new scents in the comfort of her own home. By fusing different roots and herbs together, like turmeric and ginger or lavender and jasmine, she is able to enhance her products’ capabilities with the properties derived from each ingredient.
Tatreau has more than 20 years of experience in the spa industry and community health education and is a practicing massage therapist, esthetician, skin care manufacturer, retail vendor and feng shui consultant. She supplements these passions with education and is pursuing a master’s degree in herbalism to better understand the properties of natural elements and infuse them into her own products. Tatreau says her multidimensional background has aided her with the ability to promote a more holistic approach to clean living, both physically and mentally.
The recipe and design of the Sweet Mana product line are inspired by Tatreau’s time spent living on the island of Maui, Hawaii. “I want [my products] to be like the big breath you take when you finally make it to the beach, like an escape,” she says. “[Customers] can finally sink in and settle and decompress.”
Tatreau prides herself on creating products that support this lifestyle and encourages individuals to consider proactive measures to help the body withstand changes over time. As humans age, Tatreau explains that bodies go through a variety of rejuvenation cycles. She stresses the importance of taking proactive measures to prevent any potential damage to our bodies and counteract the effects of aging.
“People don’t think about [skin] as much even though it is our largest organ,” Tatreau says. “It has a lot of different functions, and it is kind of like our first line of defense and contact from things getting inside of our body, and I think that it is important for overall wellness
to take care of that.”
Simple actions like moisturizing can make a big difference. A touch of lotion will hydrate the skin, liven its tone, increase smoothness and decrease the appearance of fine lines.
In the age of COVID-19, Tatreau says many people have realized just how beneficial self-care can be for the body physically and mentally. Taking care of yourself goes beyond exercise and sleep, she says. “It is really about that whole beautification process, not the vanity side of it, but the ritual behind it. It helps with self-esteem and confidence, internally and externally.”
White Bear Lake Marketfest
You can find Sweet Mana products online and seasonally at the White Bear Lake Marketfest. Running from mid-June through the end of July, this free downtown festival features live concerts, children’s games and activities, a farmers market, a classic car show and more than 150 art, merchandise, service and food vendors every Thursday evening.
