Meet Emily Jayne

The time of year is here, bellas. There’s a chill in the air and a snap in the wind here in Chicago. The leaves are rapidly changing from yellow to brown. Tis the season for the butters.

Maybe this year you’re looking for a new butter experience. Maybe you don’t want to smell like chocolate chips or pumpkin spice or chai tea after moisturizing your situation – you’re seeking something more adult, complicated and intriguing. If that’s the case, I’ve got a new product line you need to know about. Meet Emily Jayne, the new line of body butters and fragrances by acclaimed author Joan Morgan.

I recently met Joan Morgan and over breakfast at Anthony Bourdain’s famous Les Halles on beautiful Park Avenue in New York City, she told me the origins of Emily Jayne over steak, eggs, and hot tea. Joan is an undeniably accomplished woman — she’s completing a PhD, her book When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost is taught in colleges around the country, and her writing career has been illustrious and bright. This new endeavor is a true passion project for her, and like everything she’s done thus far, it reflects her character, her aesthetic, and her background so beautifully. Emily Jayne is named for her two grandmothers, strong Jamaican women. And as this brilliant review by Crunk Feminist Collective explains, the concept behind the products goes deep. It’s about touch and pleasure and deserved decadence. It’s about celebrating ourselves, enjoying our bodies and maintaining our unique beauty.

Emily Jayne products are unusual and special in the indie body butter market. These butters are whipped to silky smoothness and scented with ginger, vetiver, cacao, sandalwood, cedar and molasses — the fragrances are mature, elegant, intriguing, refined, and very Caribbean. Like their creator. They don’t include “parabens, petrochemicals, solvents, dyes, alcohol, pesticides, mineral oil, petroleum or animal testing or six-syllable impossible to pronounce additives,” as the website eloquently explains. And where many butters can be easy to describe (I pretty much stop at “yummy” for the food flavored body butters which I tend to drift towards), these aren’t so easy. You’ll see if you check out the Emily Jayne store. These are evocative beauty products, meant to create a place in your mind. For example, Antilles Caribe: “Antilles Caribe begins and ends with the Caribbean Sun. So think Sun. Then brown sugar, lemons and the scent of freshly cut cane deepened by the mystery of molasses,” says the website. And I’m telling you when I opened the jar, it took me home. It was like a deep whiff of the fragrant air from the front porch of my grandmother’s house on Pelham Street in Belmont, Trinidad, and I mean that in the most beautiful way.

Wench is my favorite both for the name and the fragrance. Smoky sweet, spicy and seductive. There are fragrance oils that pair with these body butters, for my bellas who like to layer their highly scented products. And these aren’t solely female fragrances, I know quite a few men with discriminating taste who will appreciate the notes of Emily Jayne butters and fragrance oils.

You can check out all the Emily Jayne goodies right here – clicky click. And on Twitter, Joan can be found at @MilfinAintEasy (LOVE it) and Emily Jayne is @EmilyJayne1838 on Twitter, and right here on Facebook. Can’t wait to hear what you think, bellas!