Beauty

Motherly Love Across Two Continents

jan

Sara Green catches up with the founder of Norfolk based skin care company Motherlylove

For forty years Jan, founder of pregnancy skincare company, Motherlylove, has cared for thousands of mothers and their partners. Her story is compelling and unique and when I met Jan a few months ago it held me spellbound.

Jan has worked as a nurse and midwife both in the UK and in Africa. That’s impressive enough but dig a little deeper and it’s clear that there is a lot more to Jan’s career. She also gained a Diploma in Anaesthetics and ran the only intensive care / coronary care unit in the whole of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The extreme conditions in Africa, under which Jan worked allowed her limited support and resources and she came to understand the importance and necessity of traditional midwifery and medical practice. The respect she had for this most traditional of medicines led to her promotion of natural birth and the exploration of complementary therapies and in particular massage aromatherapy.

Motherly Love

Jan and her family returned to the UK in 1986 and she worked in both community and hospital midwifery. Keen to back up her beliefs with science (and knowing that the medical professional would accept them more readily if they were) she earned a degree at Greenwich University in Complementary Therapy (Aromatherapy). She produced an academic paper ‘Aromatherapy and Massage for Antenatal Anxiety: Its Effect on the Foetus’ which was published in the journal Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice and was the most read paper in the journal in 2007. As a result Jan became internationally recognised for her contributions to the medical understanding of complementary therapies and she was instrumental in the movement in the 1990s towards domino and home births.

Draw breath here! This amazing journey brought Jan to the decision to pour her knowledge and expertise into producing the oils that would bring traditional relief to the stresses of pregnancy and modern living. And so Motherlylove was born! Jan now produces a range of luxurious oils that have been carefully and ethically developed and of course, like everything she does, are backed by science!

Jan told me, ‘We work hard getting it right, so mothers can unwind, relax and just enjoy using our blends. The range includes beautiful fragrances to lift your spirits, carrier oils to hydrate and sooth, and constituents to pamper, energise and promote restful sleep.”