This 27-Year-Old's Preserved Flower Earrings Are More Than Just Jewelry
"Everything really is slow-made."
(SPOT.ph) Ikigai. It's a Japanese concept that means "your reason for being." There are a lot of people who have been spending their lives finding it and then living by it—27-year-old Sunny Tolentino is one of them.
"After doing a lot of inner work in order to figure out what truly matters to me, the answer always points back to my insatiable passion for consciously creating things and finding beauty in the mundane," she shares in an exchange with SPOT.ph.
Thus, Sunny Label was born.
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What is Sunny Label?
"I started Sunny Label as a slow movement and a curation of self-care essentials for a sunny life," she says.
Sunny first made and offered soy candles, which were inside jars handpainted with landscapes and seascapes. She slowly branched out to making homebrewed kombucha, handmade dried flower wreaths, and recently, preserved flower earrings.
Sunny Label is an extension of Sunny's values, so she tries to be intentional with making her products. "From where I get the pots to the paint I use. No questionable ingredients, harmful materials, and unnecessary plastic packaging," she shares.
All the materials she uses are sourced locally and carefully, "to make sure that they're good for you, for local livelihood, and for the environment."
The making of preserved flower earrings, necklaces
It's sad how flowers wither so quickly, and you always wish and try your best to preserve them for as long as you can—whether by drying, pressing, and with resin, like Sunny does to her blooms to make the prettiest flower earrings and necklaces.
"I've been researching, actually. I tried making paper flowers before. I also buy dried flowers like statice and everlasting, which I use for [my] handmade flower bundles and wreaths," Sunny shares. "And by continuous research, I found that I could try to slow down their decomposition by drying and preserving them through the resin."
Yellow and purple orchids, sunflowers, wildflowers, hydrangeas, yellow roses, et cetera are some of the blooms Sunny has preserved and put in a collection of ear candies and necklaces.
The preserved flower products start at P600 and are available online.
She gets flowers from her travels and harvests from plants she gets from weekend markets; some she grows on her balcony at home; got from her Lola; and from a permaculture farm in Bukidnon. It's a tedious process with lots of trial and error, Sunny adds.
"Basically when the flowers are in their healthiest state, I cut them off," Sunny shares. But she doesn't cut all of the flowers—for the sake of local pollinators, like bees. "Save the bees!" She quips.
Sunny loves flowers. As a kid, she watched and planted the buds with her lolas, who adorned every table and surface in their household with blossoms of different colors, types, and sizes. Her mother is just as invested in blooms: she does floral styling for weddings.
"You could say it runs in the blood," she jokes, noting that she carried the practice with her when she started living alone.
Her earrings are available in limited quantities since she has to wait three months for the flowers to bloom again. "It's a grounding process because I have to follow nature's rhythm and stay in line with the season. Everything really is slow made," she adds.
Sunny's preserved flower earrings, necklaces, as well as candles and scents, are available on her website.