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. Used as a pH adjuster, it fine-tunes the pH during making, raising the pH of a batch that has come in too acidic....
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...
The word alcohol on a moisturiser label puts some people off, and the worry is a fair one. Cetearyl alcohol belongs to a different branch of the al...
Sunflower oil does not get written about much. It carries the other oils in every formula we make, and it is the oil our bladderwrack is infused into.
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...
Sodium citrate is the sodium salt of citric acid, a plain white salt with no scent or colour. It holds the product at pH 5 to 5.5, close to the ski...
Look at the ingredient list on almost any moisturiser and the first word is Aqua. Ingredient lists run in order of quantity, so water is the larges...
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 seed kernel of Calophyllum inophyllum, a tree that grows along the shores of the Pacific and tropical Asia, where it...
Grape seed oil is pressed from the seeds left behind after winemaking, and it is marked upcycled on our label. It is one of the lightest oils in th...
Vetiver root oil contains antioxidant compounds, the vetivones chief among them, identified in laboratory studies of steam-distilled vetiver root o...
Vitamin E is one of the few skincare ingredients almost everyone has heard of. In our formulas it does two jobs, and the first is looking after the...
Most of what a skincare oil does is to soften the surface, slow the loss of water, and carry the rest of the formula evenly across the skin. Squala...
If you have looked sodium benzoate up, you have probably read something alarming about benzene. That story comes from soft drinks, and the reaction...
Jojoba is the golden liquid pressed from the seed of Simmondsia chinensis, a desert shrub. It is close in make-up to the skin's own sebum, which ma...
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. It softens the skin, and it carries punicic acid, a fatty acid found in very few o...
Some ingredients you choose. Some arrive because they came in the bottle with something else. Propanediol is the second kind. It is part of our chl...
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 are chosen for what they do to the skin. Inulin is chosen mainly as food for the microbes already living on you. That shi...
Glyceryl caprylate is made from glycerin and caprylic acid, both from plant oils. It softens the skin, and it supports the preservative in every fo...
Glycerin is the ingredient nobody puts on the front of a bottle. It has been used for well over a century, and we are rather fond of it.
Argan oil is pressed from the kernel inside the fruit of the argan tree, which grows only in southwestern Morocco. It is a good conditioning oil, r...
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, a...
Chlorella is a single-celled green microalga. The version in our formulas is an active built from compounds in the algal cell wall, made in Barcelo...
Every product with water in it has to be preserved. Gluconolactone is part of how ours is, working with sodium benzoate at the pH sodium citrate ho...
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...