If you've ever stood in a shop turning a jar over to read the small print on the back, you're in good company. Many of the people who find Boo have spent years doing exactly that, looking for something their skin will actually get along with.
Most of our products contain around eight ingredients. That's deliberate, and every one of them has had to earn its place. Here's how we decide what goes in, what stays out, and a few of the ingredients that didn't make the cut.
It starts with one ingredient
Every new product begins with a hero ingredient: the plant, oil or butter the whole formula is built around. Calendula, oats, chamomile, sea buckthorn. Everything else in the recipe is there to support it.
Nic is a biologist first, and she formulates the way she'd approach any experiment. Research comes first, then small trial batches, then a tweak, then another trial batch. It can take months before a recipe feels right. Once it does, it goes through a professional cosmetic safety assessment before we make it for sale.
The questions every ingredient has to answer
Does it have a job?
If an ingredient isn't doing something useful, it doesn't go in. A short ingredient list isn't about minimalism for its own sake. It means you can see exactly what you're putting on your skin. And if something doesn't agree with you, there are far fewer suspects.
Is it right for the skin it's made for?
The products we make specifically for sensitive skin are kept unfragranced. That includes Botanical Balm, Chamomile Cleanser, Goat's Milk, Oats & Honey soap, Natural Lip Balm, Shea Bliss soap and the Oat & Calendula shampoo bar. Essential oils have their place, and many of our soaps and seasonal products use them. But when a product is meant for skin that reacts easily, we'd rather leave scent out altogether.
How close is it to the plant?
Most of what we use is raw or only minimally refined, so it keeps as much of its natural character as possible. Dried calendula flowers, for example, are steeped in oil here in the workshop, then strained off. What's left is a golden, calendula-rich oil that goes into the formula.
Some products do need a functional ingredient, such as a preservative or an emulsifier to hold oil and water together. For those, we only choose options approved by COSMOS or EcoCert.
Where does it come from?
The honest answer is: from all over the world. We buy from a small number of specialist UK suppliers, but many skincare ingredients simply can't be grown here. Cocoa butter comes from Africa. Coconut oil often comes from the Philippines. Our shea butter is pressed by women's co-operatives in Africa.
Where we can get something closer to home, we do. Our honey is local and our goat's milk is from the UK. It isn't always easy, but it's always something we look for.
People sometimes ask whether we forage our own plants. We'd love to, but wild plants need careful drying and safety checks, including for mould, before they can go anywhere near skincare. Buying dried botanicals from suppliers who carry out those checks is the safer route.
What does it cost the wider world?
Nic's very first soap, back in 2014, was made with Trex. She later found out it contained palm oil, and palm oil hasn't been an ingredient at Boo since.
It does turn up in less obvious places, though. The stearic acid in our Gardener's Scrub soap and the SCI in our shampoo bars (a gentle cleansing ingredient) both contain components derived from palm. So while we don't use palm oil itself, we can't describe every product as palm-free. We originally found a palm free version of SCI but unfortunately the formula was changed to include palm. We're looking for alternatives to those two ingredients, but in the meantime we'd rather be honest about it.
We also leave out soy-based ingredients, because soy farming is so closely linked to forest clearance.
The ones that didn't make the cut
Not every ingredient survives the trial batches. A few that have been tried and set aside over the years:
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Neem oil. It has a good reputation in skincare, but the smell is genuinely unpleasant. It never made it into anything.
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Broccoli seed oil. Can smell distinctly of cabbage, which isn't what anyone wants on their face.
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Oils with a short shelf life. Some oils are lovely to use but start to turn within a few months. In a product that needs to last, they're not the right fit.
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Ingredients with a heavy footprint. How something is grown or harvested matters too. Sandalwood is one example: wild trees have been heavily overharvested, so it's one we choose to leave out.
Some ingredients are worth keeping but need a little help. Hemp and avocado oils have lovely credentials but can smell quite earthy, so when we use them we blend them with other oils, or add a touch of essential oil where the product allows.
And then there was the soap that set in seconds. We once tried adding white thyme to a batch of soap, and it turned to something like concrete almost as soon as it was stirred in. It was completely unexpected, and white thyme essential oil hasn't been invited back.
Colour and scent aren't everything
A good product doesn't need to be white, or smell of very much, to do its job well. Some of our favourite ingredients come with strong colours or earthy scents. Sea buckthorn is a wonderful orange, and the natural oils in our unfragranced products each bring a scent of their own.
If an ingredient has the right qualities for the skin it's meant for, we'll happily work with its character. Within reason, of course.
Ask us anything
The full ingredient list is printed on every pack and every product page, so you can check before you buy. If an ingredient is named on the front of a product, it's a meaningful part of the formula.
If you'd like to know why something is in one of our products, please email us. We make everything ourselves, so we'll know the answer, and we're always happy to talk ingredients.
You can read more about some of our favourite ingredients on our Our Ingredients page, or browse our Sensitive Skin collection.