On the back of every pack there’s a list of Latin names — that’s the product’s ingredient list. It looks complicated at first, but it’s easy to read once you know how. Here’s a short guide that works for our products and for any other cosmetics.
The order of the list isn’t random
By law, ingredients are written with their international INCI names, in descending order of quantity. The first three or four are practically the whole product. Anything under 1% can be listed in any order.
It’s the most useful thing on the label, and almost nobody uses it. If the expensive oil is eighteenth in a list of twenty ingredients, the product isn’t that oil — it just has a little of it. If water comes first, you’re mostly buying water. Either way, the label has told you, calmly and without advertising.
One rule worth knowing: ingredients under 1% can be listed in any order. So if an expensive ingredient sits right after the first three or four, with ten more after it, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a lot of it — it may be under 1% but written further up so it gets noticed. Preservatives are a good guide: most are used at up to 1%, so everything after them is in even smaller amounts.
The length of the list isn’t a grade. A soap with six ingredients and a scrub with sixteen are different products, not a better and a worse one. An emulsion needs more things to stay an emulsion.
The four labels we use
In the ingredient list of every product we make, each ingredient carries a small number — 1, 2, 3 or 4.
- 1 — Organic ingredient. An ingredient from organic farming.
- 2 — Natural ingredient. A plant or mineral ingredient of natural origin.
- 3 — Essential oil. This is where the scent comes from — flowers, herbs and plants.
- 4 — Essential-oil component. A compound found naturally in the essential oil itself — not added separately.
The numbers weren’t invented for the website. They’ve been in our ingredient lists for a long time. The only new thing is that they’re explained here, in one place.
Why the list says “Limonene” and “Linalool”
Certain fragrance ingredients must be named individually once they pass a set concentration — 0.001% in a product that stays on the skin and 0.01% in one that’s rinsed off. The rule applies the same whether they come from a synthetic fragrance or from an essential oil.
Limonene occurs naturally in lemon and orange oil. Linalool — in lavender. Geraniol — in rose and geranium. There is no lavender oil without linalool; it’s part of the lavender, not something added on top.
That’s why, in our lists, these ingredients carry the number 4. Seeing them there isn’t a sign of chemicals — it’s a consequence of there being real essential oil inside.
And if you know you’re allergic to one of the declared fragrance ingredients, that line of the label is there for you. Read it.
“Natural” isn’t a protected word. The ingredient list is.
The front says marketing. The back says ingredients. “Natural”, “clean”, “eco” have no single legal definition in cosmetics — anyone can write them on anything. The one thing that can’t be written at will is the ingredient list.
So when a brand claims something, the question is always the same: where can I check it? The answer is the same for every brand — in the ingredient list. Only there can you see whether a product really is natural, organic or whatever it claims to be. We publish the list on every product, and every ingredient has its own page — open it and you’ll see exactly which products it goes into.
Three more things on the pack
The open-jar symbol. 6M, 12M — how many months the product stays good once you open it. That’s different from the expiry date of the unopened pack.
The batch number. A short code, usually next to the expiry date. It tells the maker exactly when the product was made — if you have a question or a complaint, quote it and you’ll get an answer faster.
Who makes it, and where. The pack must show the name and address of the company responsible for the product — so you always know who to turn to.
Plastic, and where the ingredients come from
We try to keep plastic to a minimum. The soaps are wrapped in paper; the scrubs and oils come in aluminum. The gift boxes are cardboard with paper straw, the soap dishes are bamboo, the sponges are natural. The only plastic item in the shop is the pump for the aluminum bottles.
Most of our ingredients are renewable. A renewable ingredient is one that nature restores by itself — a plant that grows back. That’s every oil in our lists: olive, coconut, cocoa, shea, almond, macadamia, apricot, argan, jojoba, camellia. And every essential oil too.
And which aren’t. Six of the 43 ingredients in our catalog don’t come from plants: water and five more — Dead Sea salt, the sodium hydroxide that turns oils into soap, and three mineral pigments. That’s the whole list — and like everything else here, you can check it below.
Below is the full list of ingredients that go into our products, each with its label. Open any of them to see which products it’s in.