How a Cancer Diagnosis and Amazon Trip Led to a Clean Skin Care Brand

When Bruna Valente was pregnant with her second son, she was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer—and her entire world shifted. For months, while caring for a premature newborn, recovering from surgeries, and undergoing chemotherapy, her body grew weaker. 

“And at the same time, I finally had the space and courage to strengthen my mind and spirit,” says Valente, who was working in the corporate world as a global product manager. “I knew it wasn’t what I was supposed to do anymore.” She began asking herself what it meant to truly be well. “It felt urgent and important to pay close attention to what I was feeding my body, mind, and spirit.” 

Valente couldn’t ignore what she called “divine nudges”—she read books, listened to podcasts, enrolled in an organic skin care formulations school, and began studying ingredients from her home country, Brazil. But it wasn’t until a trip to the Amazon Rainforest, where she felt a calling to create and share with others, that her clean skin care brand, Terrain Brazilian Botanicals, was born.

“Caring for ourselves and for what’s around us go hand in hand,” she says. “Yet, when I began studying the wellness and beauty industry, I realized that businesses excelling in both were rare.”

Terrain’s products, which comprise face oils and lotion bars, are crafted from pure plant ingredients from the rainforest. Each has a function—and Valente aims to deliver a sensorial experience through aromas, textures, and colors that tell the story of the lush wilderness where they are foraged. “The properties of ingredients have been used by Natives for centuries,” says Valente, who visited the communities and witnessed firsthand how people use them for day-to-day application.

Take the best-selling Luz daytime brightening face oil, which is formulated with sweet orange and buriti oil, an oil extracted from the moriche palm—and used to treat snake bites. The same goes for the Calma soothing lotion bar, which has copaiba oil derived from the copaiba tree, often applied to scars. Other offerings include the Abraço hydrating bar, made of murumuru and cocoa, and the Selva restorative nighttime face oil, infused with passion fruit and açai—what Valente refers to as the plant-based retinol. 

After launching—and selling out—a limited run of holiday artisanal soaps last year, Valente hopes to add cleansers to the permanent collection, as well as body products for the summer. 

For Valente, supporting those who help make her products—the families who wild-forage the ingredients and the women artisans who hand-weave her signature lotion bar baskets—is just as important as the products themselves. Additionally, each one comes in compostable or recycled materials. 

“There’s waste in anything we consume,” she notes. “But increasing my awareness and appreciation for the beauty of what’s within and around us is what inspires me to make conscious choices personally and for Terrain.” 

Shop Terrain online or locally at the Four Seasons Minneapolis spa, Watershed Spa, Hazel and Rose, ModernWell, Tao Organic Cafe and Herbery, and Lake Pointe Wellness.