Yarbs and Roots - Our Featured Local Vendor for June

Shyrra Stacy was raised by a mother who cared deeply about where her family’s food came from and was always experimenting with natural beauty products. Memories of her mother walking around the house in an avocado mask or whipping up eggs for some sort of hair treatment helped inspire Shyrra in creating her own product line and instilled a value for organic and environmentally conscious ingredients.

Shyrra was born in Alaska but spent most of her adolescence in Southern California. At 18 she returned to Alaska to take care of her Granny, another magnificent and influential woman in her life. While caring for her Granny, she met some friends who had been working summer jobs in Alaska and were heading back home to Eugene, Oregon. They saw Shyrra’s waist length locks and told her that she would feel right at home in Eugene. With nothing to lose, Shyrra followed them here and did indeed fall in love with the town. She is happy to call Eugene home and is grateful to be raising her four children here. 

After studying body care, nutrition and herbalism at Australasian College of Health Sciences, Shyrra paused her pursuit of midwifery when she realized the products she had been playfully creating in her home kitchen for herself and her daughters had serious potential. The first product Shyrra perfected was her hair pomade. After looking long and hard for hair products that didn’t contain harmful ingredients and finding none, she decided to create her own and it worked so well that her daughters referred to it as “mama’s magic”. 

Yarbs and Roots is all about family - though Shyrra creates the recipes and makes the products, she relies on her husband to help take photos and her daughter to help her with promotion and social media. Shyrra’s family is bi-racial, and because of that she has worked hard to find recipes that worked well in both the thick, kinky, curly hair she and her eldest daughter have, and the silky straight locks of her younger daughters. The result is an environmentally conscientious product line made with love for everyone who seeks to take better care of their skin and hair and the planet. 

We are thrilled to feature Yarbs and Roots products in our shop this month. We will be offering her newest product, a shea butter hand and body cream inspired by the incessant handwashing that we have all been doing in response to the COVID19 pandemic. “I love shea butter, I always have a jar of it around and I wanted to create something powerful to sooth our dried out hands. It is lightly scented with chamomile essential oil and contains jojoba, avocado and sweet almond oil as well as beeswax.” Her lip balms will also be featured in the shop as well as her Rugged Relief, a moisturizer for the hands and body that was made to sooth the cracked and dry hands of a gardener. 

Yarbs is a southern abbreviation for “a yard of herbs” and roots refers to not only the plant's way of connecting to the earth, but to the family traditions and values that are reflected in the care taken in choosing sustainable ingredients and packaging and the versatility of the products. “We are here to enhance your beauty, not cover it up. We work hard to create something that is wonderful for the environment and for the customer,” Shyrra says proudly. 

 You can purchase Shyrra’s full product line on her website: yarbsandroots.com