Why We Believe in Natural
We get asked sometimes why we bother. Natural ingredients cost more, they're harder to work with, and they don't last as long on a shelf. A lab-made alternative would be cheaper and easier almost every time. So why not just use it?
Here's our honest answer: because we don't think a product should be a mystery.
The industry is only now catching up
This week, it became clearer just how far the gap is. The European Union is rolling out new rules that force cosmetic brands to phase out synthetic microplastics — the tiny plastic particles added to products for texture, colour, or a glittery finish. The phase-out happens in stages: rinse-off products like face washes by 2027, leave-on products like sunscreen and lotion by 2029, and makeup by 2035. Reports say formulators at big beauty companies are now scrambling to rebuild their formulas from scratch, because the plastic they'd been relying on for years is being taken off the table.
We read that news and felt something close to relief, not surprise. Nobody had to pass a law to get us to leave plastic out of our products. We just never put it in.
It starts with knowing what's in it
When you use clay, salt or sugar, you know exactly what you're putting on your skin. You could, in theory, find each ingredient in a kitchen or by the sea. There's no hidden chemistry, no "fragrance" label hiding a mix of dozens of unlisted compounds, no synthetic filler added just to bulk out a formula cheaply. What you read on the label is what's actually there.
That's not a small thing. A recent recall pulled more than 4 million tubes of toothpaste off shelves over manufacturing problems — a reminder that complicated supply chains and complicated ingredient lists leave more room for something to go wrong. Simple products made from a short list of ingredients you can actually picture are just easier to trust.
Nature already solved this
People have been exfoliating with salt and sugar and cleansing with clay for thousands of years, long before a chemist ever built a synthetic alternative in a lab. That's not an accident. These materials work because they do exactly what skin needs — clay pulls out oil and impurities, sugar and salt buff away dead skin while sitting there as genuinely useful minerals — and then they get out of the way. They dissolve. They don't linger in a product, and they don't linger on your skin or in the environment after you rinse them off.
We didn't invent a loophole around the microplastics other beauty brands are only now being forced to phase out. We just never started using them. That's the whole philosophy in one sentence.
We're not against modern science
To be clear, this isn't an "everything natural is automatically good" stance — that's not true, and we don't believe it. Plenty of natural ingredients are badly suited to skincare, and plenty of lab-made ingredients are safe and useful. Our belief is narrower and, we think, more honest: when a simple, natural ingredient does the job well, we don't see the point in replacing it with something synthetic just because it's cheaper or easier to manufacture at scale. If we ever found a synthetic option that was genuinely gentler, safer or better for your skin, we'd consider it. We just haven't needed to yet.
What this means for you
In practice, it means our products take more care to make. Natural ingredients vary a little batch to batch, the way a real tomato tastes different from the one before it. It means some products have a shorter shelf life than something stabilised with synthetic preservatives. We think that's a fair trade for knowing exactly what you're using.
We're not asking you to take this on faith. Look at the ingredient list on anything we sell. If you can picture where each thing came from, that's the point.
Natural isn't a marketing word for us. It's just the starting point we never moved away from.
Source: EU microplastics ban pushes beauty from ingredient swaps to manufacturing change
