OKOBOJI, Iowa | Do you smell that? It smells like Okoboji – and not the fishy, beer-soaked, wet-dog kind of Okoboji but the kind that captures happiness.
Lakeable, an all-natural perfume by Dallas Dotson, is made from the purest essential oils with subtle hints of jasmine, grass, mint and bamboo.
Dotson got the idea to make and market her own scent after a client came to Okoboji Skin Care with a rash on her chest. A perfume was to blame.
“There is no reason there shouldn’t be a natural fragrance option for clients,” Dotson said. “I didn’t care to find a company out there that already had one. I thought let’s take it a step further. Let’s actually create one, give it a name that represents northwest Iowa and the Lakes area, make sure it’s all-natural and only use area women as models for the perfume.”
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When it comes to fragrances, the Food and Drug Administration requires a list of ingredients, but there’s a loophole in the regulations. Whatever goes into the bottle can be simply listed as “fragrance.” The practice is meant to protect trade secrets.
For those with fragrance sensitivity, these cryptic ingredients may cause allergy-like symptoms with sneezing, wheezing, headaches, hives and other skin reactions.
Dotson, who opened Okoboji Skin Care in 2007, wanted to give women the option to trade in their chemical cocktails of perfume for something free of synthetic ingredients.
She began working with a company in the United States that specializes in all-natural fragrances. She received around 70 vials of different essential oil combinations and started sniffing.
“I wanted a scent that truly represented the Lakes. I wanted it to be fresh. I wanted it to smell happy, if you will, and to be really memorable,” she said. “I told myself as I was doing this, if my response to one of them was ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ it went in the no pile. It had to be ‘Wow, I love that.’”
She narrowed it down to six, but two really stood out. Now that’s Lakeable.
The earthy-smelling, all-natural perfume was released around Memorial Day last year. It sells for $65 at Okoboji Skin Care and Fleshtones, both owned by Dotson; The Look Fashions; The Three Sons; Lace Boutique, all in the Lakes area; The Studio Yoga and Barre in Spencer, Iowa; and lakeable.com.
For the marketing campaign, Dotson sought out local women to be the face of the product, feeling frustrated by perfumeries that are quick to slap a celebrity name on a bottle.
Ever since Elizabeth Taylor introduced White Diamonds in 1991, celebrity fragrances have been on the rise. There are signature scents by everyone from David Beckham, Britney Spears and Justin Bieber to Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton and Sarah Jessica Parker.
It’s not like Dotson had a direct line to Beyonce to have her drop in and pose with her perfume, but there are models she could have hired and chose not to.
Her friend Amanda Jorgensen, who owns a newly opened yoga studio in Spencer, appears in ads for Lakeable.
On the box, a metallic blue inkblot shows the crooked shape of the Iowa Great Lakes, and there’s a list of ingredients: alcohol, natural fragrance oils and natural glycerin.
To Dotson, it’s a combination that really quite likeable. Now that’s Lakeable.
