Aichabelle · The Journal

The Journal.

Essays on rare botanical actives, the making of numbered batches, and the hands behind every jar.


All essays

The full journal.

The clay ritual, in July
clay

The clay ritual, in July

On what summer asks of the skin � and why a mineral healing clay, used as a July ritual, both clears the se...

Before everything else, the mist
facial mist

Before everything else, the mist

On the small discipline of preparing the skin before you treat it � why an activating mist comes first, use...

On reading hair before we touch it
consultation

On reading hair before we touch it

Before colour or shape, the real work is reading the hair — its porosity, not its curl type. A note from th...

The shortest path from nose to memory
Journal

The shortest path from nose to memory

A scent reaches the oldest part of the brain in two synaptic steps. Every other sense is routed first throu...

The hundred-thousand-year water of Baffin Bay
aqua

The hundred-thousand-year water of Baffin Bay

Ice on the Greenland ice sheet can be older than a hundred thousand years. Each summer some drifts into Baf...

A find from the Koba shore
from the bench

A find from the Koba shore

In the tidal shallows of Guinea's Koba coast, where the Atlantic current wells up cold and mineral-rich, we...

The four materials in every aichabelle package
Journal

The four materials in every aichabelle package

Every aichabelle parcel that leaves our dispatch table contains exactly four materials: glass, for the vess...

What we keep whole for the children after us
Journal

What we keep whole for the children after us

In 2005, botanists in Israel grew a date palm from a single seed recovered at Masada — a kernel two thousan...

What the elders still teach us
Journal

What the elders still teach us

In a small room above a research laboratory in São Paulo, a 78-year-old healer from the upper Xingu unwraps...

Why the ritual is half the remedy.
journal

Why the ritual is half the remedy.

The word placebo entered medicine from Latin vespers — I shall please — sung at the bedside of the dying. B...

Nature's long clinical trial
journal

Nature's long clinical trial

Five thousand years of use is itself a kind of evidence. The bark of the white willow has been used for fev...

From the journal to the jar

Six rare actives.
Released by waitlist.

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