Salt, Water, Mineral

The apothecary shelf holds six products. It held eleven at one point, and the four years since have been mostly a process of removing things we could not defend.

The test we settled on is simple: we only sell something we already use in treatment, at the same strength we use it. That rules out the entire category of products that exist because a spa shelf looks empty without them. It also means every jar on the shelf has been through several hundred hours of use by therapists who will complain loudly if it is unpleasant to work with.

The clay is green illite, which comes from a single quarry in the Auvergne and has been mined there for long enough that the supply chain is boring, which is a virtue. We blend it with chamomile and nothing else. The commonest thing done wrong with clay is leaving it on until it cracks; a cracked mask is a mask that has started pulling water back out of the skin, and eight minutes damp does everything the twenty-minute version claims to.

The salt is sea mineral, coarse, unrefined, from an evaporation operation on the Portuguese coast. Unrefined salt is greyer and less pretty than the refined kind and holds the trace minerals that make a bath feel different from a warm bath. We scent it with cedar and bay laurel because those are the two notes that survive being dissolved in a lot of hot water.

The oil is rice bran with a little neroli. Rice bran is not a glamorous carrier oil, but it is light, it is stable, it does not go rancid in a warm treatment room, and it absorbs fast enough that people will actually use it on a weekday morning. Most of the oils that photograph better fail that last test.

What we do not sell: anything for a condition, anything claiming to change the structure of your skin, anything in an airless pump we cannot refill, and anything we would not put on a guest. If you ask us for a product we do not carry, we will usually be able to tell you what to buy instead, and where, and we would rather do that than widen the shelf.