Most brand values are written to be agreed with rather than checked. The useful ones are the refusals, because a refusal is falsifiable: either the thing is in the bottle or it is not.
no retinoids on body skin
Retinoids do real work on facial skin and have the evidence to show for it. Body skin in transition tolerates them considerably less well, and the irritation lands on exactly the areas that are already short of lipid. We leave them out across the line rather than adding them where they photograph well on an ingredient list.
no essential oil doing an active's job
Lavender is in the serum, and it is there for the scent. It is not presented as the reason the serum works, because it is not. Where a formula is fragranced we say so on the page — all three carry fragrance — and the ingredient list is where you can confirm it.
A refusal is falsifiable. Either the thing is in the bottle or it is not.
no colour added
The formulas are the colour of their ingredients. An oil blend heavy in rosehip and grape seed has a colour of its own; there is no dye making it look more like what it is supposed to be.
no invented scarcity
No cohort numbers, no countdown, no "only 200 left" on a product that ships from stock. This is a newer refusal than the others, and it is here because we broke it: an earlier version of the early-access page announced a cohort of eight hundred and a discount that no code in the system could have honoured. It has been rewritten. Writing the refusal down is the cheapest way to make the next version harder to publish.
no numbers we cannot source
If a percentage appears on this site, it comes from the manufacturer's specification or from the ingredient list. Where we could not verify a figure, it has been removed rather than softened — which is why some sentences here are vaguer than the category norm. That vagueness is the honest version.