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Hi, I'm Gabi, and I'm a learning-obsessed, semi-crunchy, imperfectly sustainable millennial mom and Founder of Bright Body + Bright Body Baby.
I care about what I put on my body. But I also know that my personal "wellness" choices mean nothing without clean water, access to healthcare, and a habitable planet.
I appreciate TF out of science. And I love a good herbal remedy, too.
I went to the trouble of starting my own business, and I'm unapologetically using it to build a better future: safe, inclusive, sustainable, and worth inheriting.
We are a science-backed, planet-first, unapologetically progressive personal care brand. We lead with our values in everything we do: our ingredients, our packaging, our giving, and our voice.
If that makes you angry, there are plenty of other brands for you.
If it makes you feel seen, welcome. We've been looking for you.
Progressivism and science are in my DNA, and I mean that quite literally.
My paternal grandfather Lourival was a known progressive in Brazil. During the 1964 military coup, he was targeted, captured, and tortured for three days. My Vovó Maria José got him out through sheer resourcefulness and the right connection at the Jesuit school where she taught English. They fled Brazil for the US shortly after.
On my mother's side, my grandparents Margaret and Mark met as graduate-educated physicists in Boston. She ran the physics lab at MIT where he did his research (yes, you read that right). He was also a WWII veteran who lost a brother on D-Day, and he carried his Ashkenazi Jewish ethnicity so quietly that I only discovered it a decade after he died, through a DNA test.
When people ask me why I care so much about standing up for science or for social change, the answer is simple: my ancestors.
When I got sick, and everything I'd been raised to believe about science, integrity, and not accepting the status quo became very personal, very fast.
I with multiple chronic illnesses: Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and POTS, plus a history of severe Lyme disease.
Back in one of my more severe flares (peep my hospital chic), I was looking for a way to give my immune system as much of a break as possible.
Shampoo wasn't gonna "cure" me, but if I could do anything to help my overractive immune system, I was game.
So, I started researching all my personal care products, and it didn't take me long to realize:
Turns out, finding a brand that met my higher-than-average standards for performance and my lower-than-average risk tolerance for ingredients was nearly impossible. So I decided to build it myself.
I started learning cosmetic formulation while stuck in bed — which, in retrospect, feels very on-brand for someone whose grandparents were scientists.
As I slowly got my strength back, I moved from researching on my laptop to experimenting in my kitchen, testing my formulations.
I fell in love with the challenge of combining the best synthetics and most beneficial herbs for high-impact products that are gentler on the body and the planet — a philosophy rooted as much in my study of yoga and Ayurveda as in a chemistry textbook.
2005 me who hated high school chemistry would have been shocked to find out that my happy place was in my own makeshift lab.
I launched Bright Body in 2017 in plastic packaging. I thought I was doing the right things — "clean" ingredients, small batch, independent.
But over the course of a year, conversations with fellow entrepreneurs here in Richmond, VA started to shift my thinking.
The number that did it: less than 9% of plastic is successfully recycled. The rest ends up in landfills, oceans, and incinerators. I couldn't unhear that.
So in 2018 I made the switch to aluminum and glass packaging, plus a refill system. Sure, it costs us more. But it's more than worth it.
After three years of unexplained infertility, three pregnancy losses, six IUIs, and two rounds of IVF, I got pregnant in August 2021. Our single embryo transfer split into two, and in April 2022 my husband and I became parents to identical twin boys.
Their skin was sensitive from the start, and the conventional "clean" baby products we tried made their eczema worse. So at three months postpartum, I started formulating for them because I couldn't help myself.
They've been eczema-free ever since.
As a mom by choice, for choice who happened to have a life-saving abortion in my journey to motherhood, the 2022 SCOTUS decision that overturned Roe v. Wade made me angry. So I decided to channel that into something productive.
Since then, we have donated 1% of our sales to pro-choice causes.
If you've made it this far, hopefully you can tell that Bright Body isn't just a personal care brand.
It's the product of a family legacy, a health crisis, a sustainability reckoning, a hard-won motherhood, and an unshakeable belief that the products you use every day should reflect the world you're trying to build.
Every formula is made with the same care and intentionality that got us here. And every purchase is a small act of building something better — for your body, for the planet, and for the future our kids deserve.
We're so glad you're here. Now let's get to work.
We’ve all heard the phrase “the personal is political.” We believe that the business is political, too. We unapologetically lead our progressive values in everything we do.
We believe Black Lives Matter, science is real, women’s rights are human rights, abortion is healthcare, love is love, no human beings are illegal, and feminism is for everyone. We embrace the fact that this will repel certain people, and that is by design.
We believe in using our small business as a force for good, and we donate 1% of our sales to the Center for Reproductive Rights. Why? Reproductive justice is one of the issues that unites us all: we are all born, and we deserve to have whatever we need to live with (or without) children in safe and sustainable communities. Reproductive justice is EVERYTHING.
While the FDA allows brands to obfuscate their fragrance ingredients, and ingredients less than 1% of the formula can be left off labels, we have nothing to hide. We proudly share all our ingredients and our processes behind choosing (and not choosing) our raw materials.
Our view of transparency extends beyond just ingredients to the way we do business. We welcome questions about any part of our process and share as much as we can without revealing proprietary information such as suppliers and formulations.
We believe that imperfect sustainability is not a marketing tool, but the vehicle with which we make all decisions. We prioritize people – our team, our customers, our communities, and beyond – and planet over profit, because money means nothing if it comes at the expense of the Earth.
We focus on imperfect sustainability because perfectionism is (1) rooted in white supremacy and (2) leaves people stuck in inaction due to fear and shame of “not doing enough” or “doing the wrong thing.” We refuse to use shame as a tool to motivate sustainable changes in our team and among our current and prospective customer base.
The “nontoxic” and “clean” products industry is full of alarmism and fear mongering. Instead, we focus on empowering our customers with information and the “why” behind our nuanced judgment calls.
We always explore nuance over false binaries and fear.
