Why the Skin Barrier Needs This Approach
Your stratum corneum, the outer layer of your epidermis, is your skin's first line of defence against the outside world. Maintaining it well matters for everyone, but it's especially critical if you live with a chronic skin condition. Even in between flare-ups, when skin looks calm and settled, that barrier needs consistent care to stay that way.
When the barrier weakens, moisture escapes, cracks appear at a microscopic level (rather like a dried-up river bed), and the drier, more damaged skin becomes more prone to irritation, allergens, and pathogens getting in. Scratching in response causes further damage, and the cycle continues. Reseal that barrier, and moisture stays where it belongs.
Healthy skin naturally produces a mix of lipids, roughly ceramides, free fatty acids, and cholesterol, that seal the stratum corneum, keeping moisture in and pathogens out. Research backs this up directly: plant oils containing linoleic acid, linolenic acid, and lauric acid have been shown to improve skin barrier function and even reduce inflammation without side effects.
This is exactly why we formulate the way we do. The oils we use are rich in those very fatty acids, especially linoleic acid, an essential fatty acid your body can't produce itself. Linoleic acid must be acquired from diet or topical application. Your skin uses linoleic acid to help synthesise ceramides, the "cement" that keeps the stratum corneum's "brick wall" intact. When ceramide levels drop, that cement starts to crumble.
Shea butter and calendula go a step further: they contain plant compounds (triterpenes, tocopherol, phenols, sterols) that act as ceramide precursors, meaning your body can use them as raw material to build its own ceramides. Borage oil is particularly rich in GLA (gamma-linolenic acid), which is useful because people with atopic skin conditions are often deficient in the enzyme needed to convert ordinary linoleic acid into GLA themselves, making an external source vital rather than just a nice-to-have.
Ceramide levels also naturally decline with age and in colder months, and this drop is linked to falling oestrogen levels during and after menopause, since oestrogen plays a role in both sebum production and skin lubrication. This is one of the reasons mature skin often becomes drier and more delicate over time, and why consistent barrier support matters more, not less, as skin ages.
Inflammation is a normal, necessary part of your immune response, but like most things, too much becomes a problem. Chronic inflammation leaves skin stuck in a cycle of firefighting rather than settling into normal, healthy function. Linoleic acid has a genuine anti-inflammatory effect on skin, which is part of why we lean on it so heavily across our formulas.
Our day and night facial skincare system is built around this fatty acid science specifically: daytime products favour saturated fats that don't oxidise in sunlight, while night-time products contain the more potent, less sun-stable polyunsaturated fatty acids best used when skin isn't exposed to UV.
Why We Avoid Emulsifiers
Emulsifiers let oil and water blend without separating, useful in a lab, less useful on your face. Your skin barrier depends on its own lipids being held in a precisely organised structure, and emulsifiers interfere with that directly: research has shown they extract lipids from the stratum corneum and disrupt their natural organisation, measurably weakening the barrier even at low concentrations, in that study, just 3% emulsifier in a fully formulated moisturising cream was enough to show real biomechanical changes. This leaves skin more prone to water loss and more vulnerable to irritants and allergens getting in, in leave-on moisturisers just as much as in anything rinsed off.
Soap, detergents, and bubble baths add a second problem on top of this: they're typically alkaline too, which disrupts the skin's naturally acidic protective film as well as its lipid balance (more on the acid mantle below). Research supports switching to soap-free cleansers instead, which is part of why we recommend the Oil Cleansing Method so strongly, particularly for anyone managing eczema or another chronic skin condition naturally.
What's Really in Most Moisturisers
Water-based creams need an antimicrobial preservative to stop bacteria growing in that watery element, common examples include parabens, formaldehyde, methylisothiazolinone (MI), phenoxyethanol, and potassium sorbate. Many of these have been linked to skin reactions. They are, by their nature, harsh. Preservatives are ingredients designed to kill microbial cells, so they are harsh on skin cells too.
The skin's microbiome, when healthy and in balance, keeps bad bacteria in check (for example the ones that cause acne). It's protected in large part by the skin's acid mantle, a thin, naturally acidic film (around pH 4.5–5.5) sitting on the stratum corneum, which creates exactly the environment your resident microbiome favours while keeping many harmful microorganisms out. Antimicrobial preservatives don't stop killing bacteria once they leave the jar, and because they can't tell good bacteria from bad, they disrupt the microbiome directly. Many conventional cleansers and soaps compound this by being alkaline, pushing skin pH away from its natural acidity and weakening the acid mantle itself. See our How Your Skin Works page for more on how this ties into overall barrier function.
Petrochemical-derived mineral oils and petrolatum are also common, since they're cheap and endlessly stable, they never go rancid because the organic matter they came from died millions of years ago, but that stability comes at a cost. They sit on skin as a purely occlusive layer, blocking pores and preventing skin from regulating itself. This occlusive quality has specifically been linked to perioral dermatitis, the lumpy spots that often appear around the mouth, most plant oils, by contrast, aren't occlusive in this way at all.
Even "natural" plant oils aren't always what they seem. Many are refined using solvents, heat, bleaching, or deodorising to extract and process them cheaply, and this processing can strip out the very beneficial compounds that made the oil worth using in the first place, sometimes leaving trace residues behind. We use unrefined and cold-pressed wherever possible, for exactly this reason. We use a very high percentage of organic oils in all our formulations too.
No Humectant? Here's Why That's Not a Gap
You'll often see moisturisers described as needing three ingredient types: humectants (which attract water from the air, like glycerin), emollients (which soften skin), and occlusives (which seal moisture in). Our balms are rich in emollients and occlusives, beeswax and plant butters, but we don't add humectants, and that's a deliberate choice, not an oversight.
Humectants work by pulling water from the surrounding air into your skin. That's genuinely useful in humid conditions, but unreliable in dry air, air conditioning, heating, or winter, exactly when your skin needs help most. Worse, in very low humidity, a humectant sitting in the epidermis can end up pulling water from your own dermis below instead of the air, effectively borrowing from one part of your skin to plump another.
Our approach sidesteps this altogether by applying balm to slightly damp skin instead, supplying the water yourself at the moment you need it, rather than hoping an ingredient will attract it from an environment that might not have much to offer. See our Water-Free Skincare Revolution page for how to do this.
Diet Matters Too
What you eat affects your skin barrier as much as what you put on it. A balanced diet rich in fruit, vegetables, and unprocessed foods supports good barrier function, and staying well hydrated helps ensure that water reaches the outer layers of skin from within. See our Foods for Healthy Skin page for more information.