Mila Busch, founder of Wild Ice Botanicals

I'm Mila. I founded Wild Ice Botanicals, and every article listed on this page is mine.

I grew up watching my grandmother make her own skincare from what her garden gave her. It worked because the ingredients were fresh when they touched her face, and where we lived there was no other option. When I came to the United States I expected the shelves to hold something better, and what I found was the opposite: products engineered to survive months of warehousing, with the fragile ingredients slowly cooking the whole time. Wild Ice is my answer to that. Every ingredient and every finished bottle stays refrigerated in our Pensacola studio from the day it is made until the day it ships, and we make small batches weekly instead of holding stock.

Becoming a mother is what turned this from an interest into a company. I was pregnant with my first child when I started taking ingredient lists seriously, and I have used our formulas through four pregnancies and years of breastfeeding since. That is personal experience, and I write about it as personal experience. If you are pregnant or nursing, your OB or midwife gets the final word on your routine, and you will find that posture in every article here that touches the subject.

A few things you should know about how I write. I am the vision behind Wild Ice and I formulate our products myself, with ten years of direct formulating experience behind every bottle. When an article rests on research, I have read the source, and it is cited so you can read it too. When something is a trade-off, I say so. The skeptical reader is my favorite reader, because I am one.

The Essentials Routine kit travels with me everywhere. It has been through more airport trays than I can count, and it is the routine I hand to a friend who asks where to start.

Below is every article I have written for the Journal, grouped by topic. Start with the science of cold if you want the argument that holds the rest together, or pick the question that brought you here.