Growing up in unique communities of growers, scientists, and medical professionals, Mary Ahern learned organically how to interrogate the natural world for its healing properties. 

As a child, she lived on a farm near Rochester, Minnesota. Her parents were early pioneers of organic farming and they grew much of their food in the rich, black soil. Her father is a chemist and her mother is a public health nurse practitioner. The children and their friends were free to roam the woods and fields when they weren't enlisted to toil in the family garden. Rochester is home to the Mayo Clinic, so talk of cutting-edge medical research and treatment was in the air.

In her later childhood the family moved to the San Joaquin Valley in California, where modern farming techniques were taught in public school. Here Mary's mother worked with the community of migrant farm workers.

As a young adult, Mary lived for four years in a small village in France's Loire Valley. Here she absorbed the rural medieval folkways of the people, for whom the wild harvesting of plants is a way of life. The villagers gathered wormwood (artemisia absinthium) from the ditches to make absinthe, foraged for mushrooms, and relished nettle soup. There was a respect for natural remedies, and through this, Mary came upon the idea of applying tansy essential oil to her skin, which had been damaged by years of repeated butterfly rashes associated with lupus. The treatment was successful, and the question of why it worked stayed with her. 

After settling in the Hudson Valley north of New York City in the late '90s, Mary worked alongside midwives as a doula for home birth, learning botanical applications for post-partum and birth. During this time she developed her first topical, a calendula (calendula officinalis) salve, which was very effective. She grew the calendula from biodynamic seeds and then solar-infused it into oil. From there, Mary expanded into other formulations, pursuing what would become a lifelong fascination with developing natural formulas, along with learning the ancient extraction methods that produce ingredients with superior efficacy. 

As a painter, Mary had always been drawn to traditional processes. She would prime linen with rabbit-skin glue and lead, and apply oil-based pigments over top. When light permeated the surface of the composition it would capture the color qualities of the pigments suspended in oil, then be halted at the lead and sent back through the pigments again. This is how the stunning, double luminosity of medieval masterpieces is achieved. Thus with the trained eye and emotional discipline of an artist, Mary began to parse and layer botanical elements into her creams, serums, and exfoliants. 

The obstacle of preservation for water-based products was the seemingly unsolvable problem at the heart of her endeavor. Undaunted, she embarked on a long, methodical journey -- testing temperatures, changing sequences -- patiently fine tuning her way to a unique preservation system that would be integral to the organic process by which she made her products. Thus she forged her own path, following her own data, confident that each step of that path was solidly built, each stone carefully placed. In March of 2020, she filed a global patent application (now pending) for her proprietary probiotic-based preservation method. With that in hand, confident she had the most stable and sophisticated formulations she had yet created, she launched a new line, Florent.