Yes, we do use preservatives, and we are proud of it!

Our meadow grown botanical extracts are bursting with natural plant compounds which are not only great skin food, but great microbe food too! If we didn’t use preservatives, our products would therefore have a very short shelf life. By adding natural preservatives to our products we are able to work in a more sustainable way, ensuring the products are still fresh when they reach your shelf and ultimately less gets thrown away.

The preservatives we use are 100% natural and wherever possible are multifunctional, providing moisturising properties for example as well as killing microbes. For more information, see out ingredients page.

We don’t use pure essential oils in our products, unless our meadow grown plants offer them up to us.  Although essential oils are amazingly powerful botanical compounds, they’re actually one of the least sustainable plant products used in the skincare industry (to find out more you can read our blog all about essential oil sustainability here).   In some instances it can take many kilograms of plant matter to produce a single drop of essential oil... to ensure that these amazing botancial compounds still make their way into our products we work with essential oils more sustainable counterpart; hydrosols!  The trick is that when making our hydrosols, if our plants offer up a small amount of essential oil we don’t separate them from the hydrosol, so our hydrosols are absolutely full to the brim of powerful plant compounds.

As we don’t add pure essential oils or fragrances to our products, they smell of... well, the ingredients that they’re made of! In most instances the botanically scented floral waters are the strongest aromas that come across, however we use a lot of raw oils, which though they’re packed full of skin goodies, means they haven’t been deodorised and smell more strongly of the plants they are made from than their processed/refined cousins. As a result, our products smell aromatic, natural and earthy rather than sweet and floral.

We believe in creating beautiful natural skincare products that are truly sustainable and good for nature. And we don’t mean we just buy organic ingredients, avoid palm oil or give money to environmental charities. By growing our own ingredients we can ensure that nature sits at the heart of absolutely everything we do, for more information see these pages about our meadow and sustainability policies.