Articles and guides
Practical advice, ingredients and stories about solid cosmetics.
In-depth guides
Choose a topic and find practical answers.
Ingredient Atlas
Ingredient origins, textures and practical answers about cosmetic labels.
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Solid Cosmetics School
Practical lessons for using, storing and travelling with solid cosmetics.
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Which One? Comparison Studio
Clear comparisons for the cosmetics you use, the routines you enjoy and the gifts you give.
Read the guideArticles: 776
Ingredient Atlas
Caprylyl glycol
Some ingredients do their best work at the meeting point between different parts of a formula. Caprylyl glycol is one of them. Its story is about getting materials to spread...
Ingredient Atlas
Common juniper wood oil
Juniper is often introduced through its blue-black “berries”, but a cosmetic label can take us somewhere else entirely: the woody parts. Common juniper wood oil invites a closer look at...
Ingredient Atlas
Calcium gluconate
Calcium on a beauty label can make the mind jump to nutrition. Calcium gluconate offers a more useful cosmetic lesson: a mineral-related ingredient can be a small part of a...
Ingredient Atlas
Jasmine flower extract
A jasmine flower looks almost weightless. Turning a harvest of those flowers into a fragrance material is anything but effortless. Follow the blossom from its climbing stems through collection and...
Ingredient Atlas
Benzoic acid
Benzoic acid has a connection to berries, but its most useful cosmetic story is about keeping a product suitable to use. It also reveals something easy to miss on an...
Ingredient Atlas
Ginger root oil
Cut across fresh ginger and the scent is already vivid: spicy, bright and faintly citrus-like. A perfumer follows that aromatic side into a prepared oil. The route begins with the...
Ingredient Atlas
Alcohol · ethanol
The word Alcohol can send a label reader straight to a familiar bottle of perfume. In a solid cosmetic, the story can be smaller and less obvious: a solvent used...
Ingredient Atlas
Indian frankincense oil
Before frankincense becomes an oil, it has a more sculptural form: pieces of fragrant resin collected from a tree. The journey from those golden, irregular pieces to a clear aromatic...
Ingredient Atlas
Clove leaf oil
Most of us picture a tiny brown nail when we hear clove. The leaf oil asks us to look higher up the branch. Glossy green foliage on a tropical tree...
Ingredient Atlas
1,2-Hexanediol
A name that begins with numbers can look like the least inviting thing on a beauty label. Yet 1,2-hexanediol opens a useful story about multitasking: helping ingredients mix, contributing to...
Ingredient Atlas
Vetiver root oil
The grass above ground looks ordinary; below it, a dense aromatic root system supplies an oil with earthy, smoky depth.
Ingredient Atlas
East Indian lemongrass oil
A lemony fragrance can begin in a field without a lemon tree in sight. East Indian lemongrass makes that delightful trick possible: long, aromatic leaves become a vivid essential oil....
