Three Ingredients

Field Notes — January 2026

The morning I decided to make my own skincare, I was standing in a drugstore near Park City reading the back of a tube marketed for childhood eczema.

My son's skin had been raw for weeks. Red patches on his forearms, behind his knees, the kind of inflamed dryness that wakes a kid at night scratching. We'd tried three different products already — all labeled "gentle," "natural," "dermatologist recommended." None of them were working.

I'm not a dermatologist. I'm an environmental scientist. I spent years studying how chemicals move through ecosystems — tracking surfactants in watershed runoff, identifying endocrine disruptors in soil samples, mapping the routes pollutants take from application to accumulation. I know how to read an ingredient list, and I know what those compounds do once they cross a biological barrier.

So I stood there in that drugstore and read. Phenoxyethanol — a preservative flagged for neurotoxicity in multiple peer-reviewed studies. Sodium lauryl sulfate — a surfactant I'd documented as an aquatic toxicant in environmental impact assessments. Fragrance — a single word that can legally conceal dozens of undisclosed compounds, many of them endocrine disruptors. All packaged in a tube with cartoon animals and the word "gentle."

I put it back on the shelf and went home.

What I made that evening was not sophisticated. It was three ingredients in a Mason jar, measured on a kitchen scale, heated in a double boiler. Sunflower oil. Beeswax. Glycerin.

I chose sunflower oil because the peer-reviewed literature was unambiguous. A 2013 study in Pediatric Dermatology showed that sunflower oil significantly improved skin barrier function in subjects with and without atopic dermatitis. A separate trial involving 497 preterm infants demonstrated a 41% reduction in sepsis risk from topical sunflower oil application — not because it fought infection directly, but because it repaired the skin barrier so effectively that pathogens couldn't get through. The oil's linoleic acid content — nearly 61% in high-oleic varieties — feeds the skin's ceramide production pathway. Its vitamin E concentration is six times higher than olive oil's. And its comedogenic rating is zero. It does not clog pores.

I chose beeswax because it creates an occlusive layer that seals moisture against the skin without suffocating it. Unlike petroleum-based occlusive agents — mineral oil, petrolatum — beeswax is breathable. It lets skin function as skin. It also carries its own antimicrobial properties, documented in dermatological literature stretching back decades.

I chose glycerin because it's a humectant — it draws water from the atmosphere and holds it at the skin's surface. Even in Park City's high-desert air, where humidity can drop into the low teens, glycerin pulls enough environmental moisture to keep the skin hydrated between applications.

Three ingredients. Each supported by peer-reviewed evidence at the concentrations I used. No preservative needed because there's no water phase for bacteria to colonize. No emulsifier needed because beeswax binds oil and glycerin naturally. No fragrance, no colorant, no thickener, no chelating agent, no pH adjuster. Nothing present that wasn't doing necessary work.

My son's eczema cleared in two weeks.

That balm is now BARRIER, and I've thought a lot about why it works so well — not just physiologically, but as a design principle.

The beauty industry has a complexity bias. More ingredients signal more research, more sophistication, more value. A product with twenty ingredients feels more advanced than one with three. The ingredient list becomes a kind of résumé — proof that the formulator thought of everything.

But complexity in formulation creates cascading problems that most consumers never see. Every additional ingredient increases the probability of sensitization — allergic or irritant reactions that develop over time. Preservative systems, necessary whenever water enters a formula, are among the most common contact allergens in dermatological literature. Emulsifiers can disrupt the very skin barrier the product claims to repair. Fragrances, even "natural" ones in complex blends, introduce variables that are difficult to control and impossible to fully disclose under current regulations.

And then there's the math of stability. A three-ingredient formula has three potential pairwise interactions to manage. A twenty-ingredient formula has 190 — that's the combinatorics of every unique pair, n times n-minus-one divided by two. Every one of those interactions represents a chance for degradation, contamination, or off-spec behavior over the product's shelf life. The more complex the formula, the more you need stabilizers to manage the complexity you created — ingredients whose sole function is solving problems introduced by other ingredients.

This isn't a philosophical preference. It's a risk assessment. When you've spent your career evaluating how chemicals behave in complex systems — ecosystems, watersheds, biological organisms — you develop an instinct for parsimony. The most robust systems are rarely the most complicated. They're the ones where every component is load-bearing.

I want to be clear about what minimalism means to us, because it doesn't mean what some people think.

It doesn't mean primitive. BARRIER's three ingredients are carefully sourced — organic, regeneratively farmed high-oleic sunflower oil chosen for its superior oxidative stability, beeswax from a Utah beekeeper, USP-grade botanical glycerin. The formula is designed around the precise melting point where beeswax softens and releases at skin temperature — you warm it between your fingers and it becomes something else entirely, absorbed in seconds. That transition is engineered, not accidental, and it creates a sensory experience that rivals products with ten times the ingredient count. Simplicity in formulation requires more precision, not less, because there's nowhere to hide.

It doesn't mean one-size-fits-all. NOURISH, our daily serum, contains eight ingredients — sunflower, jojoba, plum kernel, rosehip, sea buckthorn, sandalwood, vanilla, and bergamot — because the science of facial skin repair calls for a broader array of fatty acids and bioactive compounds than body hydration does. The number changes. The principle doesn't: every ingredient must be individually justified by peer-reviewed evidence, and nothing goes in that isn't doing essential work.

And it doesn't mean anti-science. It means more science, applied more rigorously. When you formulate with three ingredients, you can trace each one's contribution to clinical outcomes. You can source with complete traceability. You can manufacture without the quality-control headaches that plague complex formulations. You can look at the product and know exactly what it will do, because there's nothing in it you don't understand.

Sometimes I think about that drugstore shelf. All those tubes with their twenty, thirty, forty ingredients, packaged in reassuring pastels with words like "gentle" and "pure." I wonder how many of them were formulated by someone who'd actually read the toxicological literature on the ingredients they chose. Not the safety data sheets — those are designed to manage liability, not inform decisions. The actual peer-reviewed research. The long-term exposure studies. The endocrine disruption assays.

I don't say this to be righteous. I say it because the gap between what the science knows and what the industry does is wider than most people realize, and it's widest in the products marketed for the most vulnerable skin — babies, children, people with eczema and other barrier disorders. These are the consumers who need the most protection and often get the least.

BARRIER started as a solution for one child. It became a principle: that fewer, better ingredients — chosen with scientific rigor and formulated with restraint — will outperform complex products not despite their simplicity but because of it.

Every product we make at NICER follows this principle. We typically work with 3 to 9 ingredients. We never add a compound we can't justify with published evidence. We never use an ingredient whose function is to solve a problem created by another ingredient.

There's no shortage of what the earth provides. The craft is in knowing what belongs.

— James Birchler, Founder + Chief Scientist

NICER follows the precautionary principle: only ingredients proven safe and effective by peer-reviewed science. Every formulation is handcrafted in small batches near Park City, Utah. Learn more at feelnicer.com.