This is the story of our new small family business.
As such stories go, it begins with a small family. Leslie and I have been married since 1985. We have a grown daughter and son whom we’re very proud of. We make a great team.
Leslie was first a bookkeeper. After our first child was born in 1992, she learned how to manage our personal website and post photos of our kids for the family. When local businesses discovered there was a web designer in town—the first in Claremore, Oklahoma—her web design business was born. It was a perfect situation for a stay-at-home mom. She did this for 20 years, until the technology outpaced her interest in keeping up. Since her retirement, she’s been very involved in volunteer activities in the community and looking after her parents.
I'm a semi-retired mechanical engineer. I've helped design storm drainage systems, offshore drilling rigs, industrial manipulator arms, rocket engines, and most recently electric submersible pumps for deep oil/water wells. Throughout my career, I've been heavily involved with quality functions and system design/troubleshooting.
In late 2014, when the deadly Ebola virus was killing thousands in Africa, I became concerned after learning some infected patients were being treated in nearby Dallas, Texas. I happened across an article about Sierra Leone approving colloidal silver as an official treatment after surprising success . That led to some research about colloidal silver. I learned about many non-monetary uses for silver going back thousands of years. Also, colloidal silver was discovered about a century ago and was the most widely used antimicrobial until the 1930's.
Further investigation found that very few “colloidal silver” products are the genuine article, having a significant concentration of silver nanoparticles suspended in pure water alone. Most are water with dissolved ionic silver, which usually reacts and becomes deactivated upon contact and thus has little or no persistent microbe killing ability. Other products use protein or polymers to accelerate the process and suspend more particles. This results in larger, less effective nanoparticles which are also largely isolated from their surroundings by the protein or polymer. The few good colloidal silver products I found were quite expensive, at least from my frugal perspective.
To become well-informed consumers of this product, I dug deeper. I learned about a dubious technology called "colloidal silver generators,” which seemed to do little more than produce silver ions with few (if any) of the far more desirable silver nanoparticles. I determined that if we wanted to produce real colloidal silver, first we'd have to develop a better manufacturing method.
In late 2014, we began creating the process and apparatus to make real colloidal silver we could use around our northeast Oklahoma homestead. Our manufacturing process soon advanced beyond anything else we knew of. I partially retired in mid-2016, limiting my work to part-time consulting, so I could allow more time to further improve our colloidal silver manufacturing method. We continued to refine the process over the next two years, ultimately producing over a hundred test lots. The resulting colloidal silver was as good or better than anything else available, in terms of quality—smaller in particle size and higher in concentration.
During the development, family and friends found additional uses for our colloidal silver, and encouraged us to sell it. We were reluctant to do so because of far more government interference in our lives, if we sold it as a high quality supplement. Regulations present too high of a risk of being attacked if we claim, and then disclaim, our products as a cure, treatment or prevention, despite the long history of silver use as such. Considering all of that, in mid-2018, we decided to market a ridiculously high quality product for household and cosmetic uses only and scaled up the manufacturing process to support sales. Smart Colloidal Silver was born.
About that time, we developed processes to include silver in other cosmetic products at concentrations far exceeding anything else available. It was a natural fit. Our 150ppm Silver Lip Balms and 500ppm Silver Cream, joined the product line under our new company name, PPM Silver Cosmetics, LLC.
Nearing the end of 2018, we launched our website and several sales channels which accept many forms of payment. We accept STEEM and STEEM Dollars at our Shopify Store and direct orders using Cryptocurrency.
Friends are helping find new retail outlets. We're developing another unique, high ppm silver cosmetic product for release soon. It’s all quite exciting for this retired couple as we write a new chapter in or lives and keep that young feeling alive. We hope you’ll do your own research to learn about the many personal uses of silver and join us on this journey through the later years of our youth.
Leslie and Mike
PPM Silver Cosmetics LLC
near Salina, Oklahoma