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.
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Gift & Gifting Encyclopedia
300 articles about thoughtful gifts: people, occasions, traditions, beautiful presentation and words that feel like you.
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Body Cleansing Explained
Does your skin feel tight after the towel? Are you choosing a bar, or wondering where to put it when it’s wet? Start with the part of the shower you’d like to make easier.
Read the guideArticles: 1444
Ingredient Atlas
Pink pepper berry oil · Schinus molle
A bright little fruit from a weeping tree supplies an oil with peppery sparkle, citrus lift and a resinous background.
Ingredient Atlas
Coriander fruit oil
The little round things in a jar of coriander seeds have a botanical secret: they are fruits. That makes Fruit Oil a perfectly sensible cosmetic name, even when the picture...
Ingredient Atlas
Clary sage essential oil
Clary sage has a small visual trick: some of the showiest colour around its flowers comes from bracts, rather than petals. Its essential oil has surprises too. A plant you...
Ingredient Atlas
Sandalwood oil · Santalum album
A tree’s inner wood yields an oil with a creamy, lingering character, and a growing story that includes companion plants.
Ingredient Atlas
Sal-tree resin
A forest material can help a cosmetic leave a coherent, glossy trace. This is the tree’s resin story, separate from its seed butter.
Ingredient Atlas
Bitter orange leaf oil
An orange tree has more to offer than oranges. Its leaves carry a fragrance story of their own, one that can lead from a city garden to the small print...
Ingredient Atlas
Damask rose flower oil
An early-morning flower harvest becomes a remarkably complex oil, with green and spicy details behind the familiar rose.
Ingredient Atlas
Orange-flower oil · neroli
An orange blossom offers a different kind of brightness from the fruit. Neroli follows that flower into a distilled aromatic oil: fresh, floral and green, with a seasonal story that...
Ingredient Atlas
Centifolia rose absolute
A rose can become an aromatic concentrate with honeyed depth, through a journey very different from pressing a seed oil.
Ingredient Atlas
Bitter-orange leaf oil
An orange tree has more than one perfume to offer. Peel, blossom and leaf lead in different aromatic directions. Bitter-orange leaf oil—often encountered as petitgrain—invites you into the green canopy,...
Ingredient Atlas
Cinnamon leaf oil
Cinnamon usually appears in our minds as a curled brown stick. This ingredient begins higher up the tree, in the leaves. That change of plant part opens a striking aromatic...
Ingredient Atlas
Glyceryl oleate citrate
A liquid emulsifier can help create a rich cream—or a lotion light enough to spray. Glyceryl Oleate Citrate is an interesting ingredient for that contrast. Its value is in arranging...
