Lemon Laine Enters Next Chapter

The skin care wall in Lemon Laine resembles a very aesthetically pleasing home medicine cabinet. Laura Lemon, founder of the East Nashville natural beauty and wellness store, wants people to feel at home and try out the products she’s curated. 

It’s a streamlined approach that helps cut through the noise in the skincare and beauty space. 

“I loved creating a space for women, especially, to shop and feel at ease knowing that it's quality products,” she says. “I do that hard part for them. They're not feeling overwhelmed by just scrolling online or hearing from a friend that they really like it, but their skin is entirely different than yours.” 

Beauty industry veteran Lemon tries each of the products herself. Her background is broad and varied, from making lip balms and selling them to friends in middle school to working as a makeup artist in college. She later helped introduce natural beauty products to Walmart, worked in product development at natural brand Yes to Carrots and eventually helped launch Gwenyth Paltrow’s Goop makeup brand and the Goop by Juice Beauty skincare line.  

After seven years of being established in Inglewood, the store moved just a half-mile up the road to 1600 Woodland St. in July, across from Urban Cowboy. In addition to natural skin care, Lemon Laine offers body care, supplements, candles, makeup and fragrances. It is the only store in Tennessee to carry some of its brands.  

Lemon Laine also manufactures two of its own products. Lemon Laine Botanical Bounce Glow Moisture Face Oil Serum is a best-seller at the store, inspired by the many custom facial oils created at the previous location. Lemon also created Matcha Tasty, a matcha powder that she’s replaced her coffee with and imports from Japan.  

With a background in holistic nutrition, Lemon checks all product ingredients against the Environmental Working Group safe list. Some are made solely from plant extracts, while others incorporate man-made ingredients — but all are tested for safety. More than 10,000 chemicals have been introduced into the product care market since the 1970s, she says, so it’s a challenge to decipher the effectiveness and health impact of each one. 

“My big litmus test is: is this ingredient going to cause harm on a cellular or blood level in your body, to disrupt your hormones or cause autoimmune disorders, cancer, toxicity?” Lemon says. “Those are the big red flags I'm looking for when I'm looking at ingredients.”

A good place to start? Body lotion. It goes on the largest surface area.  

Step inside Lemon Laine and you’ll smell Mama Bread (the spot Lemon’s husband part-owns next door) or the store’s custom Flamingo Estate Jasmine candle. (Evan Lemon is also part-owner in Groceries Etc., a vinyl listening bar and lounge upstairs.) 

Lemon says the boom in skin care and makeup offerings in recent years is propelled — in large part — by Instagram. People see themselves much more in videos and photos, so they’re more conscious of their looks. In addition, she says, the barrier to entry to create a beauty brand is low, and the profit margin is high. 

“My job is sifting through the amount of brands that I see that send me products to try or on Instagram,” she says. “It's never-ending.”

However, Lemon is pleased to meet more and more customers who already share her conviction that it is important not to put chemicals on their bodies. They’ve gotten more savvy over the years as the products themselves have improved, she says. 

“When I started, when I was shopping for natural makeup, I was going to Whole Foods, and it was like chalk,” Lemon says. “The money hadn’t been put up yet. Now the money is there, so the technology and ingredients are really great and on par with what you would buy not naturally.” 

Lemon says that much of her clientele comes through word of mouth, and the store fosters community through a yearly membership program that offers access to regular events and a five percent discount on purchases. If customers didn’t know about natural products already, they can learn more at Lemon Laine. 

“When we host events, I want them to feel like they're learning something new, whether that's makeup tricks or the gut skin connection,” Lemon says. “I feel like that's something that people are really craving right now, and they can get off their phones, off their computers, and actually meet in person and meet someone new, learn something new.”