As a teenager, our founder and CEO, Jennifer battled chronic cystic acne, trying every over-the-counter and prescription medication available to help clear the persistent condition.

Relief finally came from an ancient family salve recipe rooted in traditional healing techniques that was handed down by Jennifer’s grandmother, Juanita Villegas. This formative, early life experience, combined with Jennifer’s extensive knowledge of whole food nutrition and her pro skin experience collide in Shimmer Chef.

As both a graduate of the Natural Gourmet Institute Culinary School and a licensed esthetician, Jennifer draws on her intimate knowledge of how plant superfoods rebalance, fortify and sustain our skin.

Practicing as an official Health-Supportive Culinary Arts Chef at Provenance Meals – where wellness experts design food to nourish and cleanse the body - Jennifer began to investigate how living foods protect, heal and transform both our inner and outer selves.

She combined this expertise with her body of knowledge on Ayurveda - which she gained during her yoga and meditation certification – with the legacy, skin-healing recipes she inherited from her Mexican grandmother.

Our "For Sanford Sisters" pledge serves as a personal promise to each one of our customers that every Shimmer Chef product meets the same high standard of safety and purity our founder first sought for her own daughters. A pledge that each of these products is carefully crafted to be free of harmful ingredients, prioritizing health and effectiveness, just as she would for her own family.

Some brands are born from market gaps. Others are born from motherhood. For Jennifer Sanford, the founder of Shimmer Chef, it was both: a beauty ritual with her daughters, a bout of childhood eczema, and a nagging feeling that the products touching her girls’ skin weren’t safe enough. That moment sparked something deeper—a desire to nourish from the inside out, to protect her daughters’ well-being, and to reclaim beauty as something rooted in culture, safety, and self-respect.

In this week’s Motherhood Identity Series, we meet a mother who became a licensed chef and esthetician to develop her own formulas and built a beauty brand inspired by ancestral Mexican folk remedies, powered by science, and grounded in maternal devotion. As a single mother of four daughters, her story is as textured as the products she creates—full of pivots, sacrifices, and quiet victories.