Founder, The Botanical Atelier

The first memory of my life was the sound of wailings and cries — the ache of family being torn apart. I was four years old when I was sent to Korea without my parents, too young to understand why. At Kimpo Airport, I remember hands letting go, the blur of faces, the sound of my mother’s voice swallowed by distance. That sound — that grief — became the beginning of my consciousness.

In the years that followed, I lived between silence and survival. My world was small and unpredictable, but nature never failed me. On my long walks to school, I found comfort in the hibiscus that bloomed faithfully each morning, in the jujubes that fell and sweetened on the ground, and in the caterpillars that quietly transformed when no one was watching. They were my witnesses — proof that beauty could endure chaos, that softness could exist in a life that had forgotten how to be gentle.

When I returned to America, I didn’t recognize my mother’s face, and my skin — inflamed, reactive, defensive — carried all the memories my body couldn’t speak. I spent years trying to heal what I didn’t yet understand: that the skin remembers everything, that tenderness is not weakness, and that sometimes healing begins with remembering.

Why The Botanical Atelier Exists

It took nearly forty years to come full circle — to understand that the very things that once caused pain became the roots of purpose. What was once survival has become devotion; what was once silence has become language. The Botanical Atelier is that language — a way of speaking care into being, one formula at a time.

I return now to the same truths that saved me as a child: that beauty endures, that care restores, and that softness is strength. Every product I create carries that intention — to remind us that the act of tending to our skin is more than ritual; it is remembrance. It is the quiet way we tell ourselves: we have survived, and we are still becoming.

Beauty, at its truest, is not perfection. It’s redemption. READ THE FULL STORY HERE