How we choose what goes in

Shea butter sits second on the label because it's second in the mix, not tenth.

Every jar and bottle in the catalogue lists what's inside in the order it's mixed — heaviest ingredient first, trailing off to the small stuff at the end. That rule sounds simple until you're the one deciding what counts as a real ingredient and what's filler dressed up with a Latin name. This page walks through how that decision actually gets made, in the order it happens.

Why it matters

Most skincare copy talks about what an ingredient does. Ours talks about how much of it is actually in the bottle, because that's the part almost nobody states. A rosehip facial oil that lists rosehip fourth, behind three cheaper carrier oils, is a different product from one that lists it first — and both can legally use the same front-label claim.

We don't run a lab and we don't publish clinical percentages, because we don't have clinical studies to back a number and won't invent one to sound more convincing. What we can state honestly is the mixing order, the size of the container, and what we've watched a formula do on real skin over the years we've sold it. That's what the label carries, and it's what this page explains. The same logic holds for a shea butter hand cream as it does for a facial oil: what matters is where the ingredient actually sits on the list, not which one gets the biggest word on the front of the tin.

Raw ingredients including shea butter and rosehips on a wooden board

SourcingSteps 1–2

We start from what a jar actually needs, not what's cheap to buy in bulk.

Shea butter, jojoba, squalane, rosehip oil, oat — none of these are unusual raw materials, and none of them are marketed as breakthroughs. They're picked because they behave consistently across seasons and across different skin types, and because a supplier can tell us where a batch came from if something ever looks off. We buy from a small number of suppliers we've used for years rather than chasing the lowest quote each time a shipment runs out.

An ingredient earns a place on the list if it does one clear job — moisturizing, carrying an active oil, softening — and it loses that place the day we find something that does the same job better at the same or lower amount. That's happened twice in the life of the catalogue. Both times the change went out on the next batch's label, not quietly.

Shea butter, rosehip and oat are sourced whole, not pre-blended, so we control the ratio ourselves.

The ingredient order on the label is the actual mixing order, not a marketing sequence.

Cosmetic labeling convention already requires ingredients in descending order by weight above one percent — we just don't bury it in an insert or leave it off the product page the way a lot of catalogues do. If shea butter is second on the Quiet Hours Night Cream, it's the second-heaviest thing in the jar behind water, full stop. We won't move a marketing ingredient higher on a page description than it sits on the actual label.

This is also why the catalogue stays at twelve items. Every product needs someone on our side who can recite its ingredient order from memory when a caller asks, not read it off a spec sheet for the first time. Forty products would mean nobody actually knows any one of them that well.

No percentages are published, because we don't run the assay work that would make a number honest. We'll say the order instead.

Hands stirring a small batch of cream in a steel bowl

Mixing & decidingSteps 3–4

Small batches get mixed and worn before a formula is allowed to ship.

Before any formula goes on the page, a small batch gets mixed by hand and someone on the team wears it — on the back of a hand, the inside of an elbow, a patch of jaw — for at least two weeks. We're watching for pilling under makeup, a slow-drying finish that never quite absorbs, or a scent that fades unevenly. None of that shows up in a lab spec, only in daily use.

If a batch feels different from the last one — thicker, grainier, slower to melt into skin — it doesn't ship under the same name until we know why. Raw shea butter varies a little harvest to harvest; that's normal and we adjust the whipping time to compensate rather than pretend every batch is chemically identical.

Wear-testing happens on real skin, on our own team, not on a panel we can cite a number from.

What doesn't make the label is as deliberate as what does.

No cleanser in the catalogue carries added fragrance. If an oil used for scent — citrus peel, bergamot — is also doing a job in the formula, it's named as that oil on the label, not folded into a generic "fragrance" line the way a lot of packaging does to protect a proprietary blend. We don't have a proprietary blend to protect; there's nothing to hide behind the word.

We also won't add an ingredient purely because it tests well on a bottle-shelf comparison — a heavier silicone finish that feels rich in-store but sits on skin all day is the most common complaint we hear about other brands, and it's the failure mode we build against on every reformulation.

Every finished label gets read back against the mixing sheet before a batch ships. That step doesn't get skipped for a rush order.

We keep twelve products. Not forty. Twelve.

That number isn't a slogan, it's a ceiling. Every formulation step above happens for each of the twelve, in full, every time a batch is mixed — and that's the amount of attention we think a household actually wants behind a jar it puts on its face.

See all twelve, grouped by kind

Want the ingredient order for a specific jar before you ask about buying it? Send the name and we'll read it back exactly as it appears on the label.

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