Ingredients — Bearded Hipster

The full formulas

Each product page carries its own table — the ingredient, the percentage by weight, and what that ingredient is actually doing in the jar.

The four things we use everywhere

Grass-fed tallow

Rendered beef fat. It is unfashionable and it works, because its fatty acid profile is close to what human skin makes. It is the reason a balm feels like skin food rather than candle wax.

Raw unrefined shea butter

Unrefined, so it still smells faintly of shea and still carries its own unsaponifiables. Refined shea is whiter, cheaper and does less.

Beeswax

The hold. Twenty per cent in a balm, forty-five in a wax. It is the single ingredient that decides whether a product is conditioning or structural.

Cold-pressed carrier oils

Jojoba, sweet almond, grapeseed, argan and a little castor. Cold-pressed because heat-extracted oil is cheaper and flatter.

Release 001 — the Record Store scent

Cedar, warm dust and vinyl. This is the blend that goes into all five products at between 0.8% and 2%, depending on whether the product stays on your face all day or gets rinsed off.

Material	Share of blend	What it is doing
Cedarwood, Virginian	38%	The spine of it. Dry, pencil-shaving cedar, not the sweet Atlas kind.
Frankincense	12%	Lifts the cedar so it does not read as a hamster cage.
Vetiver	12%	This is the dust. Earthy, slightly damp, the smell of a room that does not get aired.
Benzoin	10%	Sweet resin. The warm in warm dust.
Labdanum absolute	8%	Old paper and old glue. It is what makes a sleeve smell like a sleeve.
Amyris	8%	Standing in for sandalwood at a tenth of the price, and nobody can tell.
Tonka bean	5%	Rounds the edges. Stops it being austere.
Black pepper	5%	A bit of bite in the first ten minutes.
Birch tar	2%	The vinyl. Smoke and warm rubber. Two per cent is already a lot — go to three and the whole thing smells like a bonfire.

On the word vinyl. There is no natural material that smells like a record. Birch tar and labdanum together get you close — smoke, warm rubber, old paper glue — and that is an approximation, honestly made. If we ever use a perfumer's synthetic accord to get closer, this page will say so.

Things we do not put in

Sulfates in the wash. Decyl glucoside and cocamidopropyl betaine instead.
Minerals oils and silicones. They are not dangerous, they just sit on top.
Growth claims. There is no ingredient here that grows hair, because there is no ingredient anywhere that grows hair.

Full INCI labelling ships on every jar. If you have reacted to a grooming product before, patch test on the inside of the elbow and leave it 24 hours. If you have a known tree-nut allergy, note that sweet almond oil appears in the oil, the balm and the butter.