March 24, 2025
From Nature to Bottle: How We Source Our Ingredients
A finished formula hides almost everything about where it came from. The oil in a bottle looks the same whether it was cold-pressed in small batches or extracted with solvent at industrial scale — but the skin can tell, and so can the people who grew it.
This is how our ingredients reach us, and why the list is shorter than it could be.
Choosing Growers Before Ingredients
We buy from a small number of cooperatives and family farms we have worked with for years, on multi-season agreements rather than spot purchases. That gives growers something to plan around, and it gives us harvests we can predict.
Every botanical arrives with its origin, its harvest date and its certificate of analysis. If a batch cannot be traced back to a field and a season, we do not take it.
Extraction, and Why It Matters
Heat and solvent are cheap and fast, and they cost you the delicate compounds that made the plant worth using. Cold pressing and supercritical CO₂ extraction cost more and yield less; they also leave the actives intact.
- Argan and rosehip: cold-pressed within days of harvest, never refined.
- Green tea and centella: CO₂ extracted, so no solvent residue reaches the bottle.
- Everything else: tested on arrival, and rejected as a whole batch if it fails.
What Ends Up in the Bottle
By the time an ingredient is approved it has been through a harvest record, a purity test, a stability trial in the finished formula and a six-month shelf-life check. Most candidates do not survive that, which is why our formulas are built from a short list.
Packaging follows the same rule. Glass where the formula needs protection from light, aluminium where it does not, and refills wherever the format allows — because the most sustainable bottle is the one you already own.
