About Us

In the Soviet Union, everyone had the same sofa, the same radio, the same refrigerator, the same dish sets.

Practically everything was identical everywhere. Things that weren't standardized simply weren't available. If you wanted something that didn't exist on a state-issued shelf, you made it yourself or traded with someone who did.

Skincare was one of those things.

My grandmother made hers from garden fruits and vegetables, using recipes passed down through generations. I have vivid memories of watching her at her tiny vanity mirror each day, performing this ritual with the kind of seriousness that made a little girl pay attention. Her skin was beautiful well into old age. The formulas worked because the ingredients were fresh when they touched her face. There was no other option. There were no preservatives to add, no warehouses to store anything in, no shelf life to engineer. Fresh was the only way.

I carried that understanding with me when I landed in New York in 2007. I expected American skincare to be better. What I found was the opposite. Every product on every shelf was formulated to survive months of warehousing, freight, and retail display. The preservatives that made that possible were absorbing into women's skin. The active ingredients that were supposed to help had been degrading in heat the entire time. The industry had traded freshness for shelf life and called it progress.

I couldn't find what I was looking for: natural, effective, and affordable, all three together. Over the years I found two out of three occasionally. All three, never.

I started making soap for friends and family in 2012. Slowly, what began as a hobby became something more serious. By 2016 I was pregnant with my first child, and that changed everything about how I thought about ingredients. I wasn't just formulating skincare. I was making something that would absorb into my body while I was growing a baby. Every synthetic preservative I researched, every stabilizer I couldn't confidently put on my own skin during pregnancy, came out of the formula.

What replaced them was cold.

Cold inhibits the three ways skincare breaks down: bacterial growth, oxidation, and enzymatic activity. Chemical preservatives only address one of those. Cold addresses all three. That's the principle Wild Ice is built on.

In 2018 we started chilling all of our ingredients and inventory in large modified freezers. We hadn't reformulated anything. We hadn't changed our ingredients. We just started keeping everything cold. And then the reviews changed. Customers were noticing a difference we hadn't even announced, because at the time we didn't think cold storage was worth mentioning. It seemed like common sense. You chill everything else that's fresh. Why wouldn't you chill skincare?

My eureka moment came in a skincare retail chain. I noticed a display fridge by the checkout, chilling canned coffee for freshness. I looked back at the retail shelves behind me: hundreds of natural skincare products sitting at room temperature. It struck me that coffee was worthy of being chilled, but skincare costing many times more didn't merit the same treatment. That's when I connected the dots between our great reviews and our move to cold storage. That's when we started researching the science behind why it works.

Shortly after that, a retailer widely considered the holy grail among aspiring natural skincare brands approved us for initial store placement with a path to regional and national expansion. They required upgraded insurance. They were preparing us for growth. We were elated.

Then we asked how they'd store our products. We proposed a small, beautiful display refrigerator: glass on four sides, LED-lit interior, double-pane. We explained that cold preservation was central to what made our products work and that our quality would suffer without it.

They said no. They didn't want to discuss it.

So we walked away.

A spot on those shelves would have changed our business. But a product sitting at room temperature for months would have made us exactly what we built Wild Ice to replace. We chose the cold chain over the retail chain. We've made that same choice every time it's come up since.

Today, Wild Ice Botanicals is a preservative-free skincare brand that uses cold preservation instead of chemical preservatives. Every ingredient is cold-preserved from our raw ingredient library through formulation and storage so that each product arrives at the potency it was formulated at.

I formulate every product by hand. I source every ingredient. I test every new formula on my own skin before it goes anywhere near a customer. We micro-batch everything, fewer than one hundred units at a time, and we do it weekly. There's no warehouse full of inventory aging on shelves. Products are made, cold-stored, and shipped within days. We fulfill orders twice a week, which means the serum that arrives at your door was probably in our studio last Tuesday.

I'm 39 now. I have four children. I built this company while pregnant with my third, nursing my second, and chasing my first. I wear every Wild Ice product on my own face every morning and night because I built these products to be safe enough for pregnancy, nursing, and the years in between.

1,400+ five-star reviews from women who noticed the difference. We're grateful for every single one.

Warmly,
Mila
Founder, Wild Ice Botanicals