Organic Beauty Warrior
By Jen Wead
MMost female empo
Caterina Elena:
empowerment stories start with a woman
achieve success enough
ry. This is a story of a
enough to share her story. This isn’t that story.
This is a story of a woman who has been knocked down
over and over. This a story of a woman who lived through
domestic violence and survived. This is a woman who has
had her entire home and business destroyed by a hurricane,
before the days of backing up data. This is a woman who had
her formulas and ultimately her businesses stolen not once,
but twice, each time, starting from scratch to build something
even better.
Faith and destiny have played a huge part in
Caterina Elena’s journey and her business, LaZuli
Organics, which she has worked so hard to create.
Her life has been a constant cycle of challenges by
someone or something that have completely devastated
her. By devastation, we are talking to the
ground, knocked back to zero, nothing left. The
cycle would complete when her reaction to
the loss shifted to grace and forgiveness. Each
time, loss would turn into something better
than what she started with. Sometimes those
that hurt her would be affected so deeply by
her graceful forgiveness, they were the ones
that helped her the most.
We wrote about Caterina a few months
ago and were so impressed by her and her
products that we wanted to know more.
Our staff fell in love with the Almond
Body Scrub and wanted to learn
more about the rest of her
products. Getting to know
Caterina, over the last few
months, and in the two
hours we spent together
for this interview, I realized
that I would be doing
a disservice to our
readers if I didn’t focus
on the woman behind
the amazing products.
She is the type of woman
that little girls should
hear about so they can
be inspired. You don’t
have to settle for an
end when everything is
taken away from you. You can start again. And, again. And,
again.
Passions are born over time. In Caterina’s case, hers were
incubating from a very young age and she didn’t even know
it. Her step-dad was a horticulturalist who took her to work
with him all the time when she was growing up. “I get goosebumps
when I think about him because he passed away.
We’d go in this big, blue van. This was as a child. This is what
I grew up knowing. At that time it wasn’t a passion. Just like,
when you see your parents do something, it was just something
that I knew, but it was really where my heart captured
the beginning love for it,” Caterina reminisced.
She continued, “I was six years old. It was
those years growing up doing this with him
that gave me my love of Botany. It was my
step-dad and going to work with him, and
seeing him do it-that is where how it was
planted inside of me. He was an amazing
man.” She paused as she worked through
her emotions. “I miss him so much. He
would be all in this. He would be right
here doing this with me.”
From that little spark, the love began.
It really ignited in her twenties when she
met someone who introduced her to minerals.
She started doing research and the
what she could, purchased some formulas
-
tion bars and soy candles (“which I’m totally
against now-a-days,” she giggled). She
eventually went on to attend the
School of Natural Healing
of Utah. Her hunger for
science was and continues
to be a driving force
for her. Unfortunately,
a hurricane required
Caterina and her family
to evacuate their FL
home. She returned to
everything. Not only
their home and all of
hers and her family’s
belongings, she
lost her equipment,
Connued on
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FLORIDA WOMEN MAGAZINE 813.682.9364 JULY 2019 • 29