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
Sunflower wax
The sunflower can supply flow as an oil and support as a wax. A finished stick brings those two material personalities together in the same small object.
Ingredient Atlas
Tea tree essential oil
Tea tree essential oil begins far from the small bottle: rows of leafy plants, a harvest to schedule and a distillery waiting for the crop.
Ingredient Atlas
Sweet almond oil
Before almond oil reaches a cosmetic, blossom opens and pollen moves between orchard trees. The harvested kernel then takes another journey: out of its shell, into a recovered oil, and...
Ingredient Atlas
Spearmint essential oil
A bunch of spearmint on the kitchen counter has a friendly, rounded scent. In a wash bar, those leaves have already made a longer journey through harvesting and distillation, and...
Ingredient Atlas
Sunflower oil
A sunflower’s centre is a gathering of small flowers. Their seed harvest can become different oil grades—and a separately recovered wax—giving this familiar crop a rich story about selection, processing...
Ingredient Atlas
Stearic acid
Stearic acid can bring waxy body to a formula. Change its chemistry into a stearate salt and the same chemical root leads towards a different job.
Ingredient Atlas
Sodium lauryl sulfoacetate
A dry foaming ingredient and the cloud of bubbles in a wash are two different scenes. SLSA helps connect them, once water and movement join the formula.
Ingredient Atlas
Sodium lactate
A fermentation vessel is an unexpected beginning for an ingredient in a firm bar. Sodium lactate follows carbohydrates into an acid, then a salt—often delivered in water—making its full name...
Ingredient Atlas
Soap from plant oils
The same soap can meet different water in another bathroom. That small change of surroundings helps explain why the familiar bar is a chemistry story as well as an object.
Ingredient Atlas
Hydrolyzed silk
A cocoon stores an astonishing length of filament. Short fibres separated during textile preparation can take another route, becoming hydrolyzed silk: prepared protein fragments supplied for a care formula rather...
Ingredient Atlas
Sodium cocoyl isethionate
A pale pellet gives little hint of the wash it can help create. SCI turns a coconut-related fatty starting material into a surfactant that works when water arrives.
Ingredient Atlas
Shea butter
A shea butter’s yielding surface begins with something much harder: a kernel inside a shell. Between the savannah harvest and a warm stroke of a body bar lie drying, grinding,...
