How to Read a Skincare Label (and What We Leave Out)

Turn over most moisturizers and you'll find twenty to forty ingredients. Your skin needs perhaps five of them. The rest are texture enhancers, preservatives, synthetic fragrance, and colorants — there to make the product stable, white, and pleasant in a demo, not to make your skin healthier.

A short label isn't automatically better. But it is automatically more honest: every ingredient has to earn its place, because there's nothing to hide behind.

Here's what we never use, and why. Synthetic fragrance — the single most common cause of cosmetic contact dermatitis. Seed-oil fillers — cheap, unstable, and prone to oxidizing on your skin. Water — because water in a jar demands preservatives, and preservatives demand compromise.

When you read our labels you'll find things you could buy at a farmers' market: tallow, olive oil, beeswax, honey, calendula, rose water. That's not a limitation of our chemistry. It's the point of it.