Celebrating South African Heritage Through Natural Skincare and Time-Tested Home Remedies
I don't know exactly when it started, but I think it has something to do with studying English Literature. I have an absolute fascination with idioms - and I was delighted to discover that "the dose makes the poison" isn't one. It's an actual scientific principle, stated in plain language by a 16th-century Swiss alchemist named Paracelsus, that somehow became the idiom we all know: "every place has its poison."
I live in one of the most beautiful parts of this country. People visit Plettenberg Bay and say things like "how lucky you are" and "it must be paradise." And it is, genuinely. But paradise still has load shedding. Paradise still has potholes. Paradise is a little village with way more opinions than people, and it still requires the particular South African skill of just getting on with it. That quiet, stubborn, slightly absurd refusal to be beaten by circumstances. I think it might be the thing I love most about this country. Not the landscapes, not the food, not even the weather. The people, and their extraordinary capacity to make a plan.
What strikes me every September, when Heritage Month rolls around, is how much of that spirit lives in our collective kitchen wisdom. We are a country of so many different cultures, traditions, languages, and histories, each one carrying its own body of knowledge about how to heal, nourish, and care for the body. Long before there were skincare aisles, wellness brands, and twelve-step routines, there were grandmothers. There were kitchen cupboards. There were remedies passed down not because they were fashionable, but because they worked.
That's the heritage I want to celebrate this month. Not any one tradition, we have too many, and each deserves more than a paragraph, but the shared instinct that runs through all of them: that what grows from the earth, used with knowledge and care, is often more than enough.
What fascinates me is the connection between that instinct and my latest favourite discovery. "The dose makes the poison" was coined by Paracelsus, a 16th-century Swiss physician and alchemist. His point was that nothing is inherently toxic or safe; it's all about quantity. Every substance can heal at a low enough dose and harm at a high enough one. For a country with an extraordinary capacity to just get on with it, that feels spot on.
And of course, the absolute best part is that it is exactly where AYA came from.
The Kitchen Was Always the First Pharmacy
AYA was born from a home remedy. My mother suggested papaya when I was looking for something to soothe my son's reactive skin. It's this kind of knowledge that runs deep in our souls and in our shared wisdom and history, accumulated over thousands of years.
The ancient Mayans called papaya the Tree of Life and used it as a paste directly on skin rashes and wounds. By the 1500s, it had travelled from Central America to the Caribbean, and by 1550 it had reached India, the Philippines, and Malaysia. And how did it get from India to South Africa? We all know that history, but again, for South Africans, it's half a glass full, and we have a thriving, rich, and diverse Indian culture for it.
Before synthetic preservatives and petrochemical ingredients took over mid-20th-century cosmetics, skincare looked a lot like what our grandmothers did. Balms made from beeswax and cold-pressed plant oils. Fermentation is a natural preservation method. Ingredients you could eat.
AYA Natural Skin started here, with my Mom’s suggestion, passed down through generations of lived, practical experience, and became the foundation of everything I've made since 2012. Raw fermented papaya, if you want to know why fermentation makes all the difference, my favourite rabbit hole of all times - why fermented papaya changes everything. Food-grade ingredients. The "would I put this on my newborn" test applied to every single thing in every single tin.
And now for the good stuff - because what's the point of all that heritage if we don't actually use it.
The Magic in Your Kitchen Cupboard
Here are the home-remedy staples with five ingredients that have always belonged in our cupboards. for generations. The basis for countless non-toxic, food-grade solutions:
- Apple cider vinegar
- Lemon juice
- Coarse Salt
- Bicarb
- Coconut oil
You can combine these five things to make an all-purpose cleaner, toothpaste, scalp treatment, scrub, and deodorant. Or, failing all of the above, a genuinely excellent salad dressing, minus the bicarb, with a good dose of Karoo Olive Oil.
A Non-Toxic All-Purpose Cleaner
Mix one part apple cider vinegar with one part water. Add a few sprigs of rosemary or a strip of lemon rind for scent. Decant into a spray bottle. The acidity cuts through kitchen grease, dissolves residue, and leaves no chemical trace. The fact that it costs about R12 to make and works better than most of what's on the supermarket shelf is something I find endlessly satisfying.
Sulphate-Free, Fluoride-Free Toothpaste
One tablespoon of bicarb. One tablespoon of soft coconut oil - not melted, just room temperature. A few drops of peppermint essential oil. Mix well and pack into a small tin. An empty AYA Balm tin works perfectly here, which feels appropriately circular. Bicarb gently whitens, coconut oil has natural antimicrobial properties, and there's not a synthetic chemical in sight. I've been making variations of this for years. It's one of those things that makes you wonder why you ever bought the other stuff .And while you have the coconut oil out -if you haven't tried oil pulling yet, I wrote about that ritual and why I swear by it right here.
Scalp Treatment for Sensitivity and Psoriasis
This one sounds alarming until you try it, and then you become an evangelist. Massage dry bicarb gently onto a wet scalp and leave for a few minutes. Mix two tablespoons of organic apple cider vinegar into 1.5 litres of water and pour over as a rinse. Follow with the coldest water you can tolerate.
The combination rebalances the scalp's acid mantle, that slightly acidic protective layer that keeps your skin's microbiome in check, and reduces redness and irritation naturally.
It's anti-inflammatory without stripping. If you haven't read about why the skin microbiome matters yet, here it is - and it's a goodie. Repeat during flare-ups. The cold water is non-negotiable. I am a daily cold-plunge devotee, so I know this is an easy choice, but just give it a try; it's a whole new world.
A Few More from the Archive
Things passed down. Things that work. No algorithm required:
Price tag residue: A small amount of peanut butter, rubbed in and wiped off. The natural oils dissolve the adhesive without scratching the surface. Every time this works, I feel unreasonably pleased with myself.
Brass and copper: Half a lemon dipped in coarse salt, polished over the surface in small circles. The acid reacts with the tarnish, and the salt provides gentle abrasion. Rinse. Genuinely satisfying in a way that feels disproportionate to the effort.
Cuticles: A small bottle of sweet almond oil on the bedside table. A few drops massaged in at night. Almond oil is one of the carrier oils in our AYA Nourishing Oil for exactly this reason: it absorbs quickly, doesn't feel greasy, it's completely food-grade, and it has been softening and nourishing skin for centuries. Better than any dedicated synthetically stuffed cuticle product I've tried, and your nails will agree within a week.
Fresh stains: Cold milk, immediately. Soak the stained item, then wash in cold water, not warm, not hot. Heat locks a protein stain permanently. This one is an absolute winner for a messy eater like me who hasn't yet grasped the art of the serviette.
Dry, cracked lips: A rice-grain amount of AYA Balm before bed. Beeswax is breathable and actively healing; unlike petroleum-based lip balms, it allows the skin to repair itself overnight rather than just sitting on top of it. Your lips in the morning will tell the story.
Heritage Month, for me, is a reminder that wisdom doesn't always arrive in new packaging. Sometimes it's been sitting in the kitchen cupboard all along, passed from one generation to the next by women who understood that the seed-to-skin philosophy wasn't a brand positioning. It was just how you took care of your family.
Paracelsus was onto something in the 1500s. The Mayans were onto it long before that. And grandmothers across this extraordinary, complicated, beautiful country have been onto it ever since.
The dose makes the poison. The kitchen makes the remedy. And South Africans, as always, just get on with it.
I'd love to know what yours are, the remedy your mother swore by, the thing your grandmother made that nobody could quite explain but everyone trusted. These are the stories worth keeping.
Happy Heritage Month.
Keren
New to AYA? AYA Balm is where most people start — raw fermented papaya, beeswax sourced directly from beekeepers, sweet almond oil and olive oil. Food-grade ingredients. Nothing else.