ROCHESTER — For some, essential oils may seem like a fad. But for Kristina Bacchiocchi, they’re a lifestyle.

Bacchiocchi owns and operates A Happy Healthy Start Day Care in Rochester, and in the same building, has recently opened an essential oils shop. Essential oils are natural, distilled oils which carry the fragrance of the plant or other source from which they are drawn.

Those two businesses may not appear to have much overlap, but both revolve around one thing: a holistic lifestyle.

The daycare uses essential oil-based products in lieu of typical cleaners and fragrances, which Bacchiocchi said are “full of toxins.”

And in the adjacent shop, Well Oiled Machine, Bacchiocchi sells the essential oils lifestyle and lifestyle-related products to teenagers and adults, offering classes and workshops.

“I want people to think of, like, a paint night,” she said of the classes.

For Bacchiocchi, the daycare and shop are all about “non-toxic living.”

“I was really sick for a really long time,” she said, adding that for a long time, traditional treatments wouldn’t work for her. So, she said: “I started on a journey of removing toxins from my life.”

From makeup to cleaners to soap, all of the products Bacchiocchi uses in both her personal and professional life are essential oil-based.

“I just turned my life kind of into a business,” she said.

The business doesn’t end at the threshold of the daycare and shop, either. Bacchiocchi has a YouTube channel, also called Well Oiled Machine, where she further documents her holistic lifestyle.

In addition to the channel, Bacchochhi helps others with their own YouTube channels and offers services like resume, social media and marketing workshops to those looking to create a secondary income.

“I have that business side of things to offer,” she said.

The oils sold at Well Oiled Machine are bought through a distributor, Young Living. Bacchiocchi said she has no desire to go through the necessary channels to get her own oils approved.

“That process is long and hard and I have no interest in working with the FDA,” she said.

But short of creating the oils herself, there’s not much more Bacchiochhi can do to further commit to “non-toxic living.”

“It was hard at first,” Bacchiocchi said of turning her lifestyle into a business. “Covid is really what made me make that jump.”