Cosmetics made by Winnipeg mother-son duo head to Hollywood

Not every nominee is going to leave the Oscars with a trophy, but this year major Academy Award nominees will be leaving the star-studded gala with a piece of Winnipeg.

Mother and son duo Idilko and Béla Gyarmati, have three items from their line of cosmetics, Mermaid Cove, in the highly-coveted Oscar swag bags.

“Ralph Fiennes is getting my cream! So exciting. I hope he likes it!” said Idilko.

Béla adding, “We wanted to give the Oscar nominees ‘the cove’ experience and I think that there’s three major parts to that. Of cleansing, which is the soap, washing yourself with that. Detoxifying and then of course hydrating and moisturizing, rejuvinating.”

Nominees will be able to try Mermaid Cove’s Canadian glacial clay face mask, regenerative cream and a bar of soap.

“We try to capture as much of the ocean or the … essence of the sea in our products,” said Idilko.

REGENERATIVE CREAM

“This is a cream that we had created for us by a cosmetic chemist in Toronto,” said Idilko. “We very much wanted to capture the essence of the sea so he included things like sea algae extract and of course, to us, the most important ingredient and the one that captures the real cream for us is it contains pearls,” Idilko explained.

GLACIAL CLAY FACE MASK

“It’s made with real Canadian glacial clay,” said Béla. “It totally is a de-toxifying agent, it helps even the skin tone and it also smells amazing.”

SOAP

Idilko said, “It contains all our wonderful oils and butters, natural oils — sustainably sourced. We don’t include any parabens or phthalates in our soaps. It’s as clean as we can get.”

The pair’s start in the industry was not easy — it came from devastating news.

“My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and when we were kind of going through that whole process as family we thought we really wanted to look at what we were putting into our bodies, and also what we were putting on our bodies,” explained Béla.

Idilko adds, “My goal was to reduce any pollutant that got into my system. That included anything that I ate, so anything I ingested, anything I absorbed into my skin.”

Mermaid Cove is a decades-long passion project, which brings the pair’s love of the ocean to their products.

“We absolutely love the ocean, my mom has a condo in Florida and we go there all the time,” said Béla. “We visit the ocean quite frequently and one night we were pondering over what kind of name we could have for our business. My mom purchased this sign in this little cute gift shop in Florida that said ‘mermaid cove’ on it, and we’re like, how perfect is that?”

The Gyarmati’s are now part of a short but growing list of Winnipeggers who have seen their products make it to Hollywood.

“I think that Manitoba breeds a lot of innovation and it’s really cool that the international stage and Hollywood is taking notice of our province and all of the great companies and businesses that we have,” Béla explained.

Ildiko adding, “It just hit us in waves sometimes of just emotion of, wow this is happening. Our dreams are coming true.”

The Oscars are set to air on Sunday, March 2nd.