How We Care for the Planet While Caring for Your Skin

What does "eco-friendly" on a label tell you?

Very little, and that is the regulator's position as much as mine. The FTC's Green Guides, the federal rules for environmental marketing, say that unqualified general claims like "eco-friendly" or "green" carry so many possible meanings that a marketer is highly unlikely to substantiate all of them, so marketers should not make them; the guides even use a brand named "Eco-friendly" as their example of a deceptive name ^[9]. The same rules set a bar under each specific claim, and the table below shows which ones we can clear ^[9].

I find that clarifying. The way to talk about any of this is the specific way: name the practice, give its basis, and stop there. So here is what that rules out, and what it leaves.

Why are our bottles glass and our caps wood?

Because the industry default is plastic, and plastic's record is one I did not want to add to. By a widely cited 2017 analysis, about 8,300 million metric tons of virgin plastic had been produced through 2015, packaging is its single largest market, and of the plastic waste generated by then only around 9% had been recycled; the rest was incinerated or accumulated in landfills and the environment, where none of the commonly used plastics biodegrade ^[5]. Cosmetics packaging has its own version of the problem: plastic is its standard material, reuse is rare, and even recycling is difficult, because containers come back coated in greasy product residue that is hard to wash off ^[6].

Glass answers the part of that we control. It is chemically inert and impermeable to gases and vapors, so it protects what it holds without becoming part of it, and it is reusable and recyclable ^[7]. It is also one of the materials US recycling programs already collect, the bar the Green Guides set before anything gets called recyclable ^[8][9]. The footnote is that the national recycling rate for glass containers was 31.3% in 2018 ^[8], so "recyclable" only finishes its sentence at your bin. This is a material preference, and it says nothing about the safety of anything packed in plastic.

The cap is the part people ask about. Our bottles are square glass with a natural wood overcap, and wood was a deliberate choice: it is renewable because trees regrow, and a growing tree stores carbon in its wood ^[1][2]. That is the material named and the reason given, the way the Green Guides suggest qualifying a renewable claim ^[9]. What the wood does with that carbon afterward is the interesting part.

How does a wood cap contribute to carbon sequestration?

Carbon sequestration is the process of capturing and storing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and biological sequestration is the version living things do: forests and wetlands holding carbon in plant tissue, including long-lived wood ^[1]. A wood cap is a very small piece of that chain, and the chain runs further than most people expect.

Start with the tree. As it grows it takes carbon dioxide from the air and builds the carbon into wood, and that carbon does not leave when the tree is harvested; about half the dry weight of wood is carbon, and wood products go on storing it for as long as they last ^[2]. Climate accounting already treats it this way: harvested wood products are a recognized carbon pool in the IPCC's guidelines, countries report them under the Paris Agreement, and in 2015 the world's stock of wood products was a net carbon sink ^[3].

Then the end of the cap's life, which is the part most people assume undoes the rest. When wood ends up in a landfill it barely decomposes. A 1997 USDA Forest Service analysis estimated that only 0 to 3% of wood's carbon is ever released as landfill gas, with the rest staying put indefinitely, which is why its authors describe landfilled forest products as a significant carbon sink ^[4]. So the carbon a tree captured stays captured, through the cap's useful life and, by that analysis, almost entirely after it.

Two honest limits. A cap is a small object, and I am not going to inflate it into a climate program; the point is the principle of choosing a material that stores carbon over one that adds to the plastic stream ^[2][5]. And I will not call the cap biodegradable, because the same slow decay that keeps its carbon stored is what rules that claim out ^[4][9]. Those two claims cannot both be true, and the sequestration one has the evidence behind it.

Side by side, the three materials this comes down to:

Tap to open full size

Does small-batch skincare have a smaller footprint?

I do not have a number for that, and I would rather say so than make one up. What I can give you is the practice and the reasoning.

Weekly batches mean a year of stock never sits somewhere warm until it sells; every finished product waits refrigerated at about 4 degrees Celsius in the studio, from the day it is made until it ships, so what you buy was made recently. Our water-based cleanser, cream, mask, and eye serum still carry gentle preservatives so they stay safe once opened; what the cold protects is the fragile actives. The numbers on what heat and time take from those actives live in our guide to cold, and the cold-preserved approach is our answer to them.

Where the planet comes into it is waste. The quietest way skincare turns into garbage is the half-used bottle: a serum that did nothing, or one that changed in a drawer before it was finished, thrown away with its packaging. An effective product gets used up. So the things that make a product worth its price in the first place, real actives in a formula that delivers them, still fresh when you open it, are the same things that keep it out of the bin. If you have an expensive bottle sitting half full right now, the reason it did nothing is usually one of seven ordinary ones.

What our ingredient lists tell you

Where an ingredient is organic or wild-crafted, our lists mark it one at a time, an asterisk or a dagger beside each, so you can see which is which instead of taking a blanket word for it. I will not call the line all-organic, because it is not, and we hold no sourcing certification to claim. The word natural is not proof of anything by itself either: whether a natural formula holds up against a clinical one is answered in its own article, and what goes on your skin and then washes down the drain is a different question again, about what builds up from the products we use every day.

That is the whole sourcing claim, and it is deliberately small. A green word printed once on a carton covers everything inside it and can be checked by nobody. A marker printed beside a single ingredient covers exactly that ingredient, and you can count them.

How is your order packed and shipped?

Two of these choices arrive on your doorstep, so you can check them yourself. Our bottles ship in corrugated fiberboard partitions cut to hold the square bottles, with no plastic filler: no air pillows, no foam peanuts.

For domestic orders we hand packages to the Postal Service. Its carriers already serve nearly 169 million addresses, covering every state, city, and town ^[10], so a small package from us joins a route that was going to be driven anyway. That is the second thing on this page I have no number for; the reasoning is that the truck was already coming down your street.

What should you do with the empty bottle?

A recyclable bottle only gets recycled if someone puts it in the right bin. When a bottle is done:

1. Take the wood overcap off.
2. Lift out the pump or dropper.
3. Rinse the glass.
4. Put it in with your container recycling, where established programs collect it ^[8][9].

Keep the wood overcap on a shelf if you like it, or let it go; the carbon in it stays stored either way, with only 0 to 3% ever released even from a landfill ^[4].

None of this is a reason on its own to buy a serum, and I would not want it to be. Choose a product for what it does for your skin; this page is about how we try to behave while making it. If you are new to us and want the short version of what we make and why, the Start Here page walks through it.