The Voice of Fashion
ndia’s most known luxury lifestyle store Good Earth launches Amritam joining the bath and body products market with a lean, mean, fragrantly soothing line
Good Earth founder Anita Lal is known to have a fascination for fragrances, especially those fused from Indian blends and nature’s bountiful flower gardens. Those who know her well, or even a tad well, also know her as @Neroliblooms. For some it is her Instagram handle, for others it is the fragrance that wraps your senses as you enter a Good Earth store.
Amritam, the luxury lifestyle store’s introductory range of bath and body products, categorised under Coco Loco extends the scent trail, which Lal has been transmitting alongside pottery, craft, textiles, décor, the brand’s signature fragrant candles and natural, incense oils.
Coco Loco, launched last week, is created from COSMOS-certified (an organic and natural certification for cosmetics) ingredients derived from the silken cool-warmth and benefits of coconut oil. Each coconut-based product is spiked with other scents—aloe vera, oat extract, citrus oils, grapefruit, seaberry and rose, to name a few. The new line has nine, paraben-free products for body, face and hair and can be incorporated in daily self-care and beauty routines. No small ask given the recent boom in high quality, luxurious, India-made beauty products, serums, oils and moisturisers, soaps and gels which have natural ingredients and/or Ayurvedic formulas as their base. Today that segment with big players like Kama Ayurveda, Forest Essentials and Purearth categorised as luxury items or smaller ones like Just Herbs, SoulTree and others is a growing market with captive consumer mindshare in India and abroad.
It is important to disclaim that this writer has had a positive bias for Good Earth for more than two decades starting from the brand’s first store in Santushti Shopping Complex in Chanakyapuri, New Delhi. The time when its pottery, plates and bowls—designed by Lal, a trained potter—were distinct in the market. Before she became the nose for fragrant candles and incenses. Sustain, the brand’s line of clothes and textiles was still many moons away.
Later, and long before I would get to personally meet Lal, the scent of neroli, through the store’s candles had begun to linger in my mental fragrance map. When dozens of engaged conversations with Lal on crafts, food, jewellery, ceramics and textiles through her India-inspiring view of owning local design, cultural nuances, look, feel, product and artisanship followed, neroli would become a symbol, a headline word for her aesthetically compelling world (lit with fragrances but not just), beneath.
Amritam Coco Loco adds to that garden of possibilities. So when a guest at the launch commented, “Anita Lal is a gardener at heart,” it was easy to endorse with a green thumb. Not to forget that the company’s sister brand Paro has an apothecary of wellness products, oils and creams, also blended by Lal.
Coco Loco clearly intensifies the competition in the market for similar bath and body products because of their fine quality and the experience they offer. The Pink Grapefruit Raw Sugar Body Scrub (feels like sooji ka halwa and smells like bliss according to a Good Earth team member) is cleansing and exfoliating and whips up a fragrant storm. For a daily swimmer like this writer, the In-Shower Body Oil made from organic virgin coconut oil and infused with neroli is a big high. A Body and Hair Oil (I have used it just on the body and not on hair) made from moringa and jojoba with coconut oil—can launch riveting moments of sweet smelling bliss. All products mentioned here have been tried.
It must also be said that at the launch, after the containers had been capped, hands moisturised, scrubbed, washed and wiped on gentle, white towels after quick product trials and whiffs, a few miniature tangerines potted at Lal’s home garden where the launch was held, offered fragrant fuzziness. As did the flowers in the garden. Were you smelling the pretty tangerines in the pots or was it the scent of citrus flowers from the in-shower body oil, kept in trial containers? Was it the peonies nodding in grace around the heated swimming pool where the Amritam campaign was being shot live or was it the headiness of neroli springing out of Good Earth’s flower-fragrance-apothecary-candle trail.
Priced between ₹2,000 and ₹3,000, all products are available online www.goodearth.in/amritam as well as at Good Earth stores. Five per cent of net sales proceeds will be donated to Recycle India Foundation. Empty containers can be returned to avail benefits.
