Everything we put in, and why.
Forty-one ingredients, each one its own page. We list what does the work, what plays a supporting role, and what we deliberately leave unclaimed.
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Sodium hydroxide is caustic soda, and on an ingredients list otherwise made of acids it is the only thing pulling the other way. Used as a pH adjus...
Passion fruit is a superfruit, and the seed oil arrives carrying the fruit's reputation. What is in the bottle is a light golden oil that is roughl...
Rice bran oil is pressed from the bran of the rice grain, the papery outer layer that milling takes off. It is a mid-weight conditioning oil, and i...
Safflower belongs to the daisy family, and the oil is pressed cold from its seed. What matters about it is the fatty acid profile: the specificatio...
Avocado oil is one of the largest oil inclusions anywhere in the range, and it sits only in the Dry and Dry Sensitive creams. It is pressed from th...
Citric acid is one of the most widely used ingredients in food, pharmacy and cosmetics, and it belongs to the alpha hydroxy acid family. That famil...
Of all the things people write to skincare brands about, this is near the top: there is alcohol in your moisturiser. It is a fair question and it h...
Sunflower oil does not get written about much. It is the oil that carries the others, present in every formula we make, and it is also the oil our ...
Barley is malted and fermented to make the alcohol that becomes gin. The gin is distilled off, and what is left behind is a great deal of spent gra...
Of all the ingredients on our label, this is the one we most underestimated. It has no scent, no colour, no story, and it does not sound like anyth...
Look at the ingredient list on almost any moisturiser and the first word is Aqua. Ingredient lists run in order of quantity, so that means water is...
Every cream needs something to give it body, to keep the oils and the water from drifting apart, and to lend the whole thing a smooth, even feel as...
Tamanu oil is pressed from the nut of Calophyllum inophyllum, a tree that grows along the shores of the Pacific and tropical Asia, where its oil ha...
Grape seed oil is pressed from the seeds left behind after winemaking, a genuine use for what would otherwise be waste. It is one of the lightest o...
Vetiver root oil carries a set of identified antioxidant compounds, the vetivones chief among them, and the studies that found them tested the same...
Vitamin E is one of the few ingredients almost everyone has heard of, and most of what they have heard is wrong. Here is what it is doing in our fo...
Most of what a skincare oil does is quiet work: soften the surface, slow the loss of water, and carry the rest of the formula evenly across the ski...
If you have looked sodium benzoate up, you have probably read something alarming about benzene. That story is not invented, and it is also not abou...
Jojoba is the golden liquid pressed from the seed of Simmondsia chinensis, a desert shrub. It behaves like an oil, but chemically it is something m...
Rose hip seed oil is pressed from the seed inside the hip, the fruit of the wild rose, Rosa canina. It is one of the lighter conditioning oils in t...
Pomegranate seed oil is pressed from the seeds inside the fruit, and it is a good example of why the part of a plant matters as much as the plant i...
Some ingredients you choose. Some arrive because they came in the bottle with something else. Propanediol is the second kind, and when we sat down ...
Evening primrose oil is pressed from the small seeds of Oenothera biennis, a wildflower that opens at dusk. It is best known for one particular fat...
Lactic acid is one of the best known ingredients in skincare. It is an alpha hydroxy acid, and at the right strength it loosens dead cells and smoo...
Most skincare ingredients act on your skin. Inulin does not. It is food, and the things it feeds are the microbes already living on you. That shift...
This ingredient does two useful things and raises one awkward question, and since the question is about the thing this whole brand is built on, it ...
Glycerin is the ingredient nobody puts on the front of a bottle. It is cheap, it has been used for well over a century, and it works better than al...
Argan oil is pressed from the kernel inside the fruit of the argan tree, which grows only in southwestern Morocco. It is a genuinely good condition...
Bladderwrack is the brown seaweed you have stepped over on every rocky beach along the north Devon coast, the same species that grows on the rocks ...
Oil and water do not mix. Every moisturiser ever made is an argument with that fact, and the emulsifier is what wins it. Ours is made from olive, i...
Chlorella is a single-celled green microalga, and the version in our formulas is a particular one: an active built from compounds in the algal cell...
Every product with water in it has to be preserved, and most brands would rather not talk about how. This is our preservative. It is also, as it ha...
Baobab oil is pressed from the seed of the African baobab, the broad, ancient tree sometimes called the tree of life. In our formulas it is one of ...
Allantoin has been used on skin for over a century, it appears in an enormous number of products, and almost nobody talks about it. That is partly ...
Sea buckthorn oil is pressed from the small, bright orange berries of Hippophae rhamnoides, a hardy shrub of cold coastlines and mountain slopes. I...
Dragon fruit, or pitaya, is the striking fruit of a climbing cactus, Hylocereus undatus. Everyone knows the flesh. What we use is the oil pressed f...