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
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,...
Ingredient Atlas
Rice bran wax
An oil refiner separates out a waxy fraction; a balm maker can give it another job. Rice-bran wax shows how one crop can lead to several useful materials.
Ingredient Atlas
Rosemary essential oil
A rosemary sprig on a chopping board is instantly recognisable. On a cosmetic label, the same plant can lead to different preparations.
Ingredient Atlas
Rice starch
The same grain that becomes soft in a cooking pot can lend a balm a softly powdered finish. The difference starts with the tiny granules selected from it.
Ingredient Atlas
Pink clay
A rosy clay shade can come from a thoughtful blend of mineral materials. Pink clay invites you to look past the colour and meet its components, then see how those...
