Meet Rose Darling and Darling Botanicals

For over a decade, Chef Rosalyn Darling has been in search of a lip product that not only soothes her lips during long shifts in the kitchen, but also touts culinary-worthy ingredients in flavors that are worthy of even the most discerning palate. After trying hundreds of lip balms, oils, and salves, she decided to take matters into her own hands.

By hand selecting each product’s ingredients and formulating for the human senses, each creation became its own universe of flavor, art, and healing. As colleagues, family, and friends kept asking for more of her creations, Darling Botanicals was born.

Darling Botanicals is formulated to match the human skin’s natural sebum profile and curated for culinary-forward flavors. Darling Botanical Lip Crystals provide fast-absorbing, deep-rooted hydration to your lips while vitalizing the day’s intention through crystal work. Infused with nourishing jojoba, apricot, and argan, each roll-on is designed with a culinary blend of 100% pure botanical essential oils. When culinary and botanical worlds collide, what emerges is a delicious apothecary of self-care. 

Tell me about Darling Botanicals.

Darling Botanicals began with the intention to bring a form of care to herself and her community. As a chef by trade and someone who cares about the ingredients she puts in her body, Rosalyn Darling had the skills and the instruments to successfully create something that she needed, but also something that she wanted to use. This turned into magic with Darling Botanicals. 

Darling Botanicals consists of lip oils that are made from Rosalyn’s imagination. The lip balms are designed to be holistically beneficial for the body, containing ingredients that are responsibly sourced, food-grade, and flavored through real herbs and spices. Her products are made with culinary-grade oil, pure botanical essential oils, and real crystals to bring out the healing properties and intentions of the essential oils used. 

Darling Botanicals is a woman-owned, woman-run company and is proud to focus her partnerships with other woman-owned companies, like Gardenuity. Gardenuity will be featuring Darling Botanical Lip Oils as a reminder to slow down, take a deep breath, and set your intentions for the day. 

The idea of caring for the community is not an idea lost on Rosalyn Darling. This is why she has decided to give a portion of profits from the upcoming holiday season to the charity Trees That Feed. This organization works to solve community hunger, poverty, and climate change, by supplying communities and teaching people how to plant breadfruit trees. Breadfruit trees are fast-growing sources of food that allow communities to create an economy, jobs, orchards, and nutrition for their people. 

What inspired Darling Botanicals?

Rosalyn Darling had always had an obsession with lip care. So, she was on the search for a lip balm that was effective, felt good on her lips, and made from high-quality ingredients that are actually okay to be put on your lips, unlike petroleum… 

Darling is someone who is very sensory-driven. For anything that she might consume or apply to her lips, she thinks about what it tastes like, what it smells like, what it looks like, and what it feels like. This sensory engagement, combined with her standards about how she cares for her body, led her to find dead ends everywhere she looked for her lip care. 

As a chef by trade, she decided that she could design her own lip care products since she had the equipment, scales, and skills to do so. Therefore, Darling Botanicals started as a Sunday Craft Project, where she began testing out ideas for her lip needs. 

This project resulted in beautiful, culinary-grade, effective lip oil that tasted good and had intention. Her friends loved it and encouraged her to sell it, so she banded together with her creative friends and her designer friends, bought packaging, and began the journey to better lip care. Darling Botanicals is based on empathy and human compassion-based care for your body and the people around you. 

What was your career like before starting your business?

Even before starting her business, Rosalyn always wanted to create. Being a chef was something she began to pursue as early as four years old. She would go create French pastries with her close family friend and was immediately in awe of the tastes, smells, flavors, and combinations. 

For her, food became love, a way of connecting with people, sharing stories, and making memories. She couldn’t get enough of it. 

She began to self-educate on the French Culinary technique when she was thirteen years old. As a first-generation American, her immigrant parents didn’t have much, but they supported her in all of her dreams. No problem was ever too big – they went and bought crazy ingredients, clipped out recipes from newspapers, and indulged in her adventures with cooking. She believes she owes much of her success to them. 

From her childhood, she grew up to enter the workforce doing global brand marketing at PepsiCo. Here, she learned that there was a career path in culinary strategy, meaning designing foods and ideas that are scaled in mass to groceries around the country and the world. She knew this was what she was after, so she decided to diverge from her MBA marketing path and headed to culinary school. 

For three years, she went to her day job of 9-5 marketing and went to culinary straight after 5-10. Food is an obsession that she turned into a career. Her job at PepsiCo transitioned into Culinary R+D, which allowed her to launch countless global restaurant pop-ups and tons of brands.

Her original draw to food still existed throughout it all. Food is love, and food is connection. Her most important foundation in her career is human and compassion-based food and design. This is how you create experiences that tap into more than calories. Food becomes emotional and impactful, and much more than just eating. This is what she hopes to do with Darling Botanicals.

Tell us about your personal wellness journey and practices.

Darling’s wellness is all about finding harmony in her body. She stays active with walking, hiking, and low-impact exercise. She knows that joint health, emotional health, and mental health all start in the stomach, so she is conscious of what she allows to enter her body. 

Rosalyn calls herself a “Reducetarian”, which means that most of what she eats is whole foods like responsibly sourced meats, produce, and grains. However, she knows that there is a time and place for everything. If she decides to eat something more indulgent, she wants to make sure it will satisfy her at such a deeply emotional level that she knows it is well worth it. 

Finally, finding a purpose and a reason to get up in the morning, which is to help people find mindful ways to care for themselves and their loved ones.

The power of herbs and botanicals?

Food is medicine. If you are what you eat, make sure you understand what you are eating. Darling believes in a time and place for Western medical practices, but ideally, you utilize Eastern medicine practices to proactively care for and heal your mind and body. By understanding how foods interact with each other and the human body, a holistic sense of health can be achieved. Use ingredients like olive oil, fresh herbs, and leafy greens with lemon (because lemons activate the vitamin C in leafy greens), spices, and herbs. 

All of these things are more than flavor. They are packed with nutrients and health benefits. Darling encourages that everyday cooking can be delicious but also healthful and make an impact on your mind and body. 

It was incredible to get to talk to Rosalyn and learn more about her amazing life and business. We are so excited to feature her products at our company. Look out for Darling Botanicals on the shelves at Gardenuity HQ and online at gardenuity.com!