Sourcing
Most beauty brands write the sourcing story first and go looking for the supplier afterward. This page runs the other way around: what we have checked and dated, the standards we hold ourselves to, and the shape of supply node the line is being built around. Every claim here carries the day it was verified.
Standing as of September 2, 2026. Every line on this page carries the date it was written, and it moves only when something real moves.
Read what is not on that list as closely as what is: a signed supply contract, a partner we are cleared to name, a certificate with a number on it. Each one is published here the day it is true, with the date it was checked, and not one day earlier.
Four commitments, written down while they still cost us something. They are a plan we can be held to, not a record of anything we have already done.
A supplier becomes our partner on this page only when there is a signed agreement and their written consent to be named. Until that day we describe plants and regions, never people, and never a relationship we do not have.
Every batch that ships should carry the growing region and a lot number that traces back to it, printed on the box rather than buried in a database. That is the target for the first production run, and a certificate of analysis on every oil lot is the check behind it.
No community, cooperative, or family appears in our marketing before money has moved and the terms are in writing. A brand that puts a face on a label before it puts money in that person's hand is selling the face.
The line is inspired by Amazonian botanical traditions. That sentence is the ceiling of what we say about origin, and it stays the ceiling until documents let us raise it. Certifications get named here when the certificate is in hand and its number can be printed.
These are the kinds of partner the line is being built around, named so you can check our work. None of them is under contract with us today, none of them has endorsed us, and none of them appears on a label until that changes and they say yes in writing.
Fundación Chankuap has run a botanical processing and distilling operation in Macas since the 1990s, and it sells ungurahua oil and distills ishpingo leaf oil under its own label. It is the shape of node we want for the two hardest materials in the line: a processor close enough to the growers to know the lot, with a price list anyone can read.
Guayusa and sacha inchi both come out of the Napo and Pastaza valleys through grower associations rather than plantations. Winak in Archidona and the guayusa processors around Tena are the model: a cooperative that owns the drying and the first processing step, so the margin does not leave the province before the leaf does.
The cacao butter is the one material with a mature Ecuadorian export chain already pointed at cosmetics, pressed near Durán from fine-aroma Arriba Nacional beans. It is also the material most easily faked with West African butter and a story, so the specification we are writing calls for the origin on the certificate of analysis, lot by lot.
Read that list as a target, not a supply chain. The verified list above is the one that counts, and a name moves up to it only behind a signed agreement.
Ecuador has been a party to the Nagoya Protocol since December 2017. In practice that means a company cannot take a plant out of the country, study what makes it work, and build a product on the answer without a contract with the Ecuadorian state, and without a separate agreement with the community whose knowledge pointed at the plant in the first place. The United States is not a party, which makes it easy for a US brand to pretend the rule does not apply to it.
Our position is simple. We buy finished cosmetic materials as goods, at their published price, which is the narrow lane that sits outside those access rules. The day we want to develop something new from an Ecuadorian plant, that is research on a genetic resource, and it needs Ecuadorian counsel and a signed access agreement before a single sample moves. We would rather write that down now than discover it in a letter later.
The founder is Ecuadorian. That is a reason to be more careful with these claims, not a shortcut past them. Being from a place does not license you to sell it.
