How we think about skin, and how we show our working.
Skincare is full of confident promises and short on published evidence. This part of the site is where we slow down and set out the thinking behind the products: what we believe about skin, what actually goes into the bottle, and how we decide what we are willing to claim. Everything here links down to the detail, and the detail links to its sources.
Skin is a living system
Your skin is not a surface to be fixed. It is a living system, home to a microbiome of bacteria and other microbes that helps keep the barrier working and the whole thing in balance. Most of the time it knows what it is doing.
So we build products to support that system rather than override it. Support, not control. It is the quiet answer to a category full of quick fixes that promise to change your skin by Friday. We would rather work with your skin than against it, and we would rather show you why than ask you to take it on faith.
Formed in nature, led by science, guided by ethics
Three ideas run through everything, from the oils we press to the packaging we choose. They are intertwined, and they are easier to keep honest when they are written down.
Nature
The base of every product is cold-pressed organic plant oils, chosen for the bioactive compounds they carry rather than their price, the carotenoids, tocopherols, phytosterols and phenolics that refining tends to strip away. We leave out synthetic fragrance entirely, and never hide anything behind a "parfum" catch-all. The range does use a single essential oil, vetiver, and that is a deliberate choice we are happy to explain rather than bury. One ingredient also ties the range to where it is made: bladderwrack, the same Atlantic seaweed that grows on the rocks along the Devon coast, produced for us by specialist extractors in France. Kinship, not a supply chain.
Science
We think about skin the way current research does, as an ecosystem worth supporting. Prebiotics feed the microbes already living on your skin. Postbiotics are the useful compounds those microbes produce. Together they nudge things toward balance rather than stripping everything back and starting again. The discipline that matters most sits underneath all of it: Biotaderm reads the published science, it does not run it. So we credit the research, never ourselves, and we only claim what the evidence will actually carry.
The skin microbiome · How we handle evidence
Ethics
Every ingredient is on the label, in plain English, listed most abundant first, with its exact percentage published. That is unusual in a category that treats formulas as trade secrets, and it is deliberate. It sits alongside recyclable aluminium packaging, a purposely small range where each product has to earn its place, and a business being built toward B Corp certification.
Everything on the label · Our ethics
Start wherever you like
Each of these goes a layer deeper. None of them will oversell.
- The skin microbiome: what it is, why it matters, and what the research is still working out.
- How we formulate: the three kinds of ingredient that do the real work, and why each one earns its place.
- How we handle evidence: the line between reviewing science and running it, and what that means for what we will and will not say.
- Everything on the label: why we publish every ingredient and every percentage, when most of the industry does not.
- Our ethics: packaging, range, suppliers, and the road to B Corp.
And the proof sits one level down again, in the ingredient library, where each ingredient has its own page and its own references. If you ever want to check our reasoning, that is where to look.
Browse the ingredient library · Find your skin type · Shop the range