Our Credo
Everything we make begins in the monastery garden. The same plants the monks and nuns grew — calendula steeped in oil, lavender drawn from the still, olives pressed for their oil — chosen and prepared for the same reasons they always were. None of it is ours, exactly. It was kept for us, and we are only beginning to catch up.
I.The Monastic Seven
For most of a thousand years, the monasteries were Europe's doctors — “among the most important sites for the care of the sick,” as one Cambridge history puts it, for the whole early and central Middle Ages. They grew the herbs, kept the infirmaries, and wrote down what worked. When modern researchers tested the abbess Hildegard of Bingen against her own records, her accuracy came out at roughly one in ten million beyond chance. They weren't guessing.
Seven of the plants they trusted most are the spine of what we make:
-
01
Frankincense — the age-old resin for mature, weathered skin: firms and tones.
-
02
Myrrh — the infirmary resin for skin that's cracked, chapped, or very dry.
-
03
Rosemary — carnosic acid; antioxidant defense for skin and scalp.
-
04
Lavender — linalool; calms redness and irritation.
-
05
Calendula — the garden's herb for helping irritated skin recover.
-
06
Rosehip — essential fatty acids; renews softness and evens the look of tone.
-
07
Clary sage — beta-caryophyllene; calms blemish-prone, reactive skin.
II.Every ingredient earns its place
Every monastery grew a physic garden. The oldest plan that survives, drawn at St. Gall around the year 820, laid out sixteen beds of healing plants, each one named — nothing grew there by accident. In the stillroom beside it, those plants became medicine: steeped in oil, distilled, or rendered into a salve with a little beeswax or tallow, and every ingredient had a reason to be in the pot.
We hold to that. Most skincare runs to twenty or thirty ingredients — synthetic fragrance, fillers, a lab-built preservative system. Ours is plant oils, a botanical or two, a little tallow or beeswax in the balms, kept fresh with rosemary extract and vitamin E rather than anything synthetic. Every name on the label has a reason to be there, and one you could look up.
III.Caring for the body is good work
The monasteries never treated the body as an afterthought to the soul. The Rule of St. Benedict set one duty above all others: that the sick be served as Christ himself is served. From that grew real medicine — some of Europe's first hospitals, the infirmary gardens, and the abbey libraries that carried Greek and Arabic medicine into the West. They tended body and soul alike.
We believe the same. Tending the body you were given is not vanity but good and worthy work — so our formulas are gentle enough for daily use, because caring for yourself shouldn't have to wait for a special occasion.
What does your skin need?
Tell us a little about yourself, and we'll find what suits you.