How a rash, a rogue papaya, and a stern woman from Pietermaritzburg built a South African natural skincare brand.
There is a moment I return to often, when my mind meanders through old memories. I am sitting at a set of Durban traffic lights, engine idling, somewhere between a meeting I didn't want to be in and a life I hadn't yet found. My skin is staging a quiet, persistent revolt. And somewhere in the noise of that afternoon, a thought cuts clean through: this just isn't good enough.
I wish I could say that moment changed everything, but that would be a lie. I went through a lot more angst, why can't I just fit the mould, until eventually the mould, or I, cracked. Some of us fit one mould, and others fit another, and what I love about where we are in the world right now is that all the different moulds are ours to find. Finding the one that fits me has been the biggest gift I've given myself.
How I Ended Up Where I Didn't Plan To Be
We all have a backstory, some with more complications than others. Mine gave me an extra grandmother, Ruby, and that, in a roundabout way, led to my fascination with skin and natural skincare. She's a story of her own, one I'll come back to at the end.
I went to an all-girls boarding school at seven, which I'd recommend to no one. Like most Gen Xers in the 80s, I wasn't led to believe there were many options; you just had to get a degree, get a good job, and work hard. Dreams were just that, dreams. I ended up working for my father in the shipping industry, not in the graphic art career or the air hostess dream, either. My first real job was as a tally clerk, tracking offloaded cargo at the Port of Durban, where my father had built his own shipping agency from the 1970s. Old school to the core, he believed I had to start at the bottom.
Two degrees and a slow corporate climb later, I was working for the oil majors. It looked perfect. It was, in reality, a hideous nightmare. The corporate world and I were never a comfortable fit - male-dominated, stifling, disconnected from anything meaningful. My skin knew it before my mind would admit it. I'd had troubled skin as a teenager, spent years in an esthetician's chair, and developed a lasting aversion to fragrance and cosmetic chemical smells. During those corporate years, my skin went fully mad. I was a pack-a-day smoker running on cortisol, caffeine, and aspirin, surrounded, professionally and literally, by petroleum. The very substance my whole being was quietly, systematically rejecting.
The Pendulum Years
When I finally left shipping, I swung from one extreme to the next, from a two-pack-a-day habit, an excessive consumption of Diet Coke and aspirin just to get me through the day. To a complete health nut: yoga retreats, yoga teacher training, opening a yoga space, hosting workshops, meeting every green, spiritually evolved person I could find. I even enrolled in beauty school. It didn't work out, and I left with no fanfare, just a quiet moment of wondering if I'd lost the plot completely.
It was a proper mind jumble, moving from the oil majors to poetry readings about the political implications of ice cubes. I became, in my more generous moods, an eco-warrior, a slightly dramatic one. I qualified as an Iyengar yoga teacher, and I now call myself a recovering yoga teacher, mentally and physically, both. What I came to realise, somewhere between the green smoothies and the chanting, is that swapping one extreme for another is only ever a recipe for trouble. The one genuinely good thing to come out of this period: I met my husband, Richard, fell pregnant, and got married, while closely resembling a whale down the aisle.
It was around this time, too, that Richard served me that infamous dinner, baked beans on toast with pesto and a huge bowl of his homemade fermented sauerkraut. As you can imagine, the menu was hideous; even the magnificent sauerkraut couldn't save it, but this move basically ensured he was never encouraged to cook in our marriage. The best part of the evening was the reaction of George, one of his roommates, who saw the bubbling, burping mass of ripe fermenting sauerkraut and shouted, "Holy Moly, it's really alive, are you sure it's not possessed?"
I think that's where my obsession with fermentation really started, watching Richard ferment his own sauerkraut back when we were still dating, long before either of us knew it would one day help save our son's skin. George had no idea what his mildly hysterical screech would lead to. It would still be a few years before any of it turned into our signature raw-fermented papaya extract and AYA Balm.
Slowly, in all that chaos, something started to settle.
The Kitchen Where It All Began
During this time, my skin healed, my eczema calmed, and I found real peace in my body for the first time. My skin and I were finally on the same side. Then my son was born with a severe latex allergy, and not long after, everything changed.
The answer arrived through the people I love most. We were away on a family holiday when my son's allergy hit its peak. My mother had seen raw papaya used to treat bedsores while volunteering at a hospice, and suggested we try some in a balm we already had on hand. It worked almost instantly.
That was the moment I knew we needed to create a balm of our own, not just a makeshift papaya fix. My husband Richard, an aspiring beekeeper with a permaculture garden, provided the first supply of raw beeswax that became the foundation for our own balm base.
Mrs Van Tonder's Lesson
Stabilising an oil-based formulation with a fermented extract needed a different kind of rigour than my MBA in shipping had prepared me for. Richard would occasionally just look at the whole endeavour and walk out, muttering about the principles of science, fair, but alchemy has its own logic. When I ran out of Richard's beeswax, I bought commercial-grade beeswax from a cosmetic supplier instead. I learned the hard way that beeswax sold as cosmetic-grade isn't always what it claims to be; my lips started peeling with the first batch.
I eventually found a stern beeswax supplier in Pietermaritzburg, Mrs Van Tonder, who made me chew on a piece of her beeswax, then handed me a piece of the commercial-grade stuff to compare. The proof was in the pudding; it tasted nothing like hers, and I learned it in all likelihood contained petroleum-derived paraffin. It was the lesson that became our whole philosophy: if you can't eat it, you can't put it on your skin.
Mrs Van Tonder turned out to be my real education in this industry, not the beauty school I dropped out of, not the marketing, not the certifications. The growers and makers of real ingredients taught me what natural, clean, and honest actually look, smell, and feel like.
We created AYA Balm in 2011 — a hard-working, multi-tasking balm that does it all, made with raw fermented papaya.
Why We Chose Fermentation
Raw papaya was only the beginning. Fermentation does more than preserve; it transforms. It breaks papaya down into smaller molecules that the skin can actually absorb, unlocking the papain enzyme's natural, gentle exfoliating power without the harshness of acids. Read the full science behind raw fermented papaya →
It's a process traditional skincare relied on for centuries, long before "postbiotics" became a buzzword, and one we've been perfecting for over a decade - the difference between raw papaya and the raw fermented papaya extract at the heart of every AYA Balm today.
Heading South
One more upheaval before we settled as a family - and before AYA Balm earned its title as the hardest-working, multi-tasking balm in the South African natural skincare landscape. We moved from Durban to the Western Cape. My biggest challenge wasn't the move itself but the cold, going from a heat-loving, humidity-embracing person to someone who could brave a Cape winter without hiding in bed all day. My first winters here were rough. But between cold plunges and Wim Hof breathing, I stepped out of my warm cocoon and into the icy water, and, unexpectedly, fell in love with an ice bath.
This is where I am now. I start every morning with oil pulling, warm lemon water, and a spiced apple-and-prune brew inherited from my two-plus-one grandmothers, both of whom lived into their nineties with glorious skin and not a single thought for skincare trends. My skin, which spent decades in open revolt, is finally, genuinely, at ease.
The Philosophy, Simply Put
Building AYA Natural Skin from a kitchen experiment into a real skincare brand taught me things no MBA could. How to read an ingredient list. How to build genuine trust in an industry drowning in greenwashing. How to tell my own story.
As we grew from that kitchen experiment into a seed-to-skin healing balm brand, we picked up a few philosophies along the way that keep us firmly grounded. We're petroleum-free - the only place petrol belongs in our lives is in the car. We believe transparency isn't optional, not in our ingredients, and not in the story of how we got here. And we never use the word "anti-ageing."
Getting older isn't a problem to solve. Ageing is a privilege, and every line is a map of somewhere you've been. The beauty industry will tell you otherwise, loudly and at great expense. At AYA Natural Skin, we tell our own story, one that doesn't rely on fear and doesn't ask women to wage war on their own faces.
I promised I'd come back to Ruby. She was my third grandmother. Ruby and Zelda are owed a story of their own. Read An Ode to Ruby and Zelda.
AYA... From Papaya with Love.
