About
One person, a double boiler, and a lot of notes. Everything here is made by hand in Los Angeles.
I got tired of reading labels
Every bottle on the shelf had twenty-some ingredients on the back, and I couldn’t have told you what most of them were doing in there. A fair share weren’t doing anything for my skin at all. They were there to keep the water from separating out of the oil, or to make the stuff feel a certain way coming out of a pump.
So I went the other way. Fat as the base, wax to hold it together, a little butter and oil to make it spread, an antioxidant so it keeps, and something to make it smell like cedar. Six things. I can tell you what every one of them is for, which was the whole point.
How a batch gets made
Beeswax and tallow go in first because they take the longest to melt. Coconut oil next, then shea. The vitamin E and the essential oils go in last, once the pot has come back down to between 130 and 140 degrees, because heat is what destroys them.
Then it gets poured into two twelve-cavity molds, twenty-four bars at a time, and left to set. Each bar comes out, goes on a scale, and gets seated in a tin by hand.
Batch size 24 bars
Each bar weighed to 33 g
Scent and vitamin E added at 130–140°F
Every tin carries a lot number on the base
The lot number matters more than it sounds like it should. If something ever goes wrong with a batch, that number tells me which pour it came from and what day it was made, and I can find every other tin from the same run.
Nothing is outsourced
There’s no contract manufacturer here, no white-label supplier, no marketing department. If you email the address on the tin, I’m the one who reads it.
That’s a limit as much as a selling point. Batches are small, they sell out, and restocking takes as long as it takes. If that’s a problem, there are larger companies who can serve you better and I’d rather say so up front.