At Essential Skin Care Products, no chemicals are to be found. Even the packaging is all-natural.

Trish Springstead is on a crusade. Lotions and soaps are her weapons of choice.

"I'm a scientist," she said last month. "I'm an RN. I've dedicated my life since I was 20 years old to taking care of people."

And now, she said, she's going "national, or international."

Springstead, 50, is a nurse who is married to local orthopedic surgeon Richard Springstead, and four years ago she started MD Crafters. Her handmade, all-natural, all-organic soaps, lotions and other skin treatments are an alternative, she says, to the chemical- heavy products that are pushed by the huge corporations.

The name of her company is soon changing to Essential Skin Care Products, or ESP "Botaniceuticals," as she goes totally organic. Even the packaging will be glass, tea bags and recycled cardboard. No more plastics.

Springstead owns Springstead Arts & Gifts in a Victorian home downtown on E Liberty Street. But this line of products she makes in the back is her latest passion.

She earned a patent last June for her three-step New Hope skin care formula, which uses soap, lotion and her so-called Lotion Jar in a Bar.

She also has formulas for babies, anti-aging and skin disorders like psoriasis.

What's in her products: shea butter, mango butter, cocoa butter, carrot seed oil, grape seed oil, palm oil, apricot kernel oil, cherry kernel oil, pumpkin seed oil, Australian sandalwood oil, almonds, apricots, oatmeal, organic cedar wood, jasmine wax, beeswax, witch hazel and Bulgarian rose water.

What's not: any petroleum-based anything. Methyls, hexyls, benzyls, benzenes. "That's just cleaned-up sludge," Springstead said.

"We're teaching people a new way of doing things," she said. "We don't need to use all these chemicals. God gave us what we need.

"I'm not a cosmetics company. I'm not a pharmaceutical company. All I am is a hippie dancing in the daisies, and crazy like a fox."

Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or (352) 848- 1434.

Credit: MADE IN HERNANDO COUNTY; Times Staff Writer