Mother Mountain Herbals

Stina Swesey has been obsessed with the desert since she was a young girl roaming around with her brother. “I grew up in Phoenix,” she says. “That was before it was super developed up north, so we were backed up against a lot of desert. My little brother and I would ride bikes through the desert all year long, even in the middle of the summer. It didn’t matter how hot it was — we were desert kids, and that was kind of like life for us.”

As much as the desert informed Swesey’s upbringing, so did a deep creative spirit. Those elements play heavily into her skincare line, Mother Mountain Herbals. Swesey makes her entire line by hand using natural, ethically sourced ingredients, many of which come from the Sonoran Desert. She’s a one-woman show — foraging, blending, packaging and shipping.

One of her concoctions is a prickly pear serum made from Arizona-grown golden jojoba oil, pomegranate seed oil, calendula, wild-foraged creosote, wild-cultivated prickly pear seed oil, yuzu and sea buckthorn berry. Her piñon tallow repair balm fights inflammation with hand-rendered, grass-fed tallow, along with shea butter and components of various evergreens. Marigold face and body oil and mugwort “dream oil” are among Mother Mountain Herbals’ other offerings.

After working as a makeup artist in Los Angeles in her 20s, Swesey made a major decision: to move to Amish country in Ohio. “I only lived in LA for three years, and it ended up being soul-destroying to me,” she says. “I couldn’t hack the amount of hours it took to get into the union. I never had a lot of money. I was still working a job and trying to pay rent there, and then working for free to get my union hours. And people in the film industry just weren’t very nice.”

So, she bought 15 acres of land in Southern Ohio, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. “I had highly romanticized homesteading,” she recalls, “but what happened out there is that I met all of the plants that were in all of the herb books that I was reading — they were like celebrities to me. I was never starstruck in LA, and I never really cared about celebrities out there. But when I met these plants out in Ohio … it’s such a biodiverse area, and it’s super green, and I’m a desert girl. I’d never seen anything so green in my life. And that just catapulted me. I knew that this was my path.”

After her stretch in Amish country, Swesey moved again, this time to Asheville, North Carolina, where she worked in a coffee shop while continuing to study herbalism. The shop owner learned about Swesey’s interest and asked her to make some teas. The customers loved them, and Swesey’s boss became a business mentor. She recalls: “He was like, ‘What are you doing working in a coffee shop? Why don’t you start your own business? Everybody loves your teas so much, and you’re just so creative and you made these wonderful things. What are you doing working here?’ He owned the building that the coffee shop was in. And he gave me this tiny, closet-sized little apothecary to work out of and make these teas out of. That’s where I started.”

Three months later, Swesey got an email from Urban Outfitters, asking if she made skincare products. She had been making some for herself, but not commercially. Regardless, she jumped right in. Within two weeks, she’d created a line. “It was a grassroots, very folky, homegrown sort of thing,” she says. “But at that time, there were maybe a handful of people doing what I was doing.”

That was 11 years ago. And even after being featured in Vogue and Sunset magazines, Swesey was determined to keep the business small. After relocating again in 2019, this time to Tucson, she reconnected with her beloved desert.

“There is no place like the desert,” she says. “It really holds a special kind of magic here. I just love bringing new people out to the desert so that they can have their minds blown. People don’t realize that the Sonoran Desert is actually extremely biodiverse. We have so many cool plants here. And I want to share that magic with people. When I go out into the desert, I feel like it quiets my mind, and there is this really intense feeling. It’s so powerfully magical.”