Nature Inspired

Sherry Raymond-Coblantz will never have to worry about having members of animal-rights groups demonstrating against her business.

Raymond-Coblantz, owner of Sher-Ray Organic Cosmetics, wouldn’t think of testing her products on animals. Instead, she has used her own body as a guinea pig.

Beginning when she was 8 years old, Raymond-Coblantz has exhibited an entrepreneurial spirit, from selling worms on piers in Racine, Wisconsin, and in Santa Monica, California, as an elementary school student to working in interior design and real estate as an adult in South Florida.

Now 76, she produces organic skin-care products and sells them at the Tumalo Mall in Bend. Her products are the fruition of a driven, inquisitive woman who has a fervent passion for her work. She has turned her intense interest in the palliative properties of such oils as sea buckthorn seed, sacha inchi, black cumin seed, coffee arabica seed and others into two patents for her formulas and recognition as a 2014 professional woman of the year from the National Association of Professional Women.

“I educate women on how to take care of their face and their skin,” said Raymond-Coblantz. “I want people to take better care of their skin. They can’t do it with chemicals.”

She has come to that conclusion through honest effort, both theoretical and practical. She has done research – she said she consulted 20 books on Cleopatra in seeking the secrets to the Egyptian ruler’s having “the most beautiful, wonderful skin of all time” – and she has put her products to the test.

On herself.

“I took little slices of my skin and put it in a petri dish and then put it with different substances to see what it did to the skin,” she explained. “At any one time, I probably had a couple of hundred petri dishes that I was using for experiments.”

“She’s a scientist at her core, and now she’s bringing these amazing products to the world to share,” said Jill Landry, a friend and a client of Raymond-Coblantz’s who lives in Portland.

Landry, who has an extensive background in the consumer-products industry, said Raymond-Coblantz’s motivation differs from those of large commercial cosmetics manufacturers.

The Bend businesswoman cares about more than a short-term fix, Landry said.

“It’s good today, and it’s good for the long haul,” she explained, referring to Raymond-Coblantz’s product line.

Raymond-Coblantz said she remembers that as a teen-ager she had awful skin, was allergic to “everything” and found no help from commercially available products.

One of her first experiments in using natural products came when she lived in Temple City, California, a town known for its camellias. She was hired to work in a greenhouse, planting camellia seeds.

“They felt so good in my hand,” she said, recalling how she would place seeds in cheesecloth, pound the seeds and place the mixture against her skin. “And I loved the way it felt. I think that was my first experience with doing my own things with skin.”

Raymond-Coblantz had spent time in Miami during her senior year of high school and returned there after graduating. Her father, an engineer, had access to a laboratory in the area.

“Can I please use your lab to make my own skin products, because I’m breaking out from everything, and I don’t know what to do,” she recalled asking him. “I made my own formulas from then on my whole life.”

Raymond-Coblantz lived in Miami for the bulk of her adult life, working in interior design and in real estate – while also producing skin-care products for her own use.

“I never stepped out of my house for 40 years in Miami without having my own sunscreen on,” she said. “I never really thought about selling them. It’s only been in the last five, six, 10 years at most, that people recognize organic as good instead of weird.”

Raymond-Coblantz might have stayed in Miami – and never launched her professional skin-care product line – without the intervention of one of her design clients.

At the time, Raymond-Coblantz had been widowed for three years, and her client asked her if she was ready for another relationship. The client’s husband had a fraternity brother, and even though he lived on the other side of the country, she thought Raymond-Coblantz should meet him.

With her mom in a nursing home in South Florida, though, Raymond-Coblantz was lukewarm to the idea.

“He called me, and we talked,” she recalled. “And he came 4,000 miles on a blind date. Five months later, we were married.”

When Raymond-Coblantz said she didn’t want to live in Seattle or Portland, her new husband, Ron Coblantz, mentioned that he had skied at Mount Bachelor and said the nearby town of Bend seemed nice.

“They have sunshine 300 days a year,” Raymond-Coblantz, the longtime South Florida resident, recalled her husband saying.

They moved to Bend in July 2008 and bought the first house they looked at.

Events at Ron Coblantz’s 50th reunion of his eighth-grade class proved a springboard to the launch of Sher-Ray Organic Cosmetics.

“I’m his third wife and everybody knows I’m his third wife,” Raymond-Coblantz said, adding that her husband’s friends at the event chided him for robbing the cradle.

When she informed them that she is actually three years older than he, the reaction was one that validated all the work and dedication she had applied to taking care of her skin over the years.

“The women wanted to know who my cosmetic surgeon was,” Raymond-Coblantz recalled. She replied that it was merely the use of her own serums that kept her skin looking young and vibrant.

“That’s how my business was born,” she added. “I had 20 ladies who wanted my serums.”

In her business, Raymond-Coblantz applies the same dedication to creating the best possible products as she always has.

“She’s a perfectionist in whatever she does,” said Tracy Shinkle, a client and a friend of Raymond-Coblantz’s, who lives in Bend. “She doesn’t take any shortcuts.”

And she still doesn’t. Her insistence on top-quality products extends to the bottles she uses for packaging. The biophotonic violet glass bottles, when kept in the light, she said, make the molecules of the product move around, thus producing the actions of a preservative without anything synthetic being added to the products. Without these bottles, she said, her products would have a shelf life of only three to four months.

“She does it for a love of the product and her passion for the product,” Landry added. “The stories she has about people who have tried everything – it’s amazing.”