What the Land Gives Us

Field Notes — February 2026

There's a salt deposit in central Utah where the earth is the color of rust and cream. It sits about 300 feet below the surface, left behind by a Jurassic sea that covered this landscape 200 million years ago — long before the Wasatch Range existed, before the Great Basin opened up, before anything resembling modern contamination had entered the water cycle. When you hold this salt in your hand, you're holding minerals that have never encountered an industrial pollutant.

I think about that fact a lot. Not as a marketing line — as a formulator, as someone trained to think about what enters the body through the skin and what it does once it's there.

I came to bodycare through environmental science. Before I started NICER, I spent years studying how chemicals move through ecosystems — how a surfactant applied to soil ends up in groundwater, how an endocrine disruptor in a creek eventually shows up in tissue samples downstream. When I began formulating products, I couldn't stop thinking like a geographer. I kept asking: where does this ingredient come from? What is the story of this place? And does the place itself have something to teach me about what belongs on skin?

That question turned into something we now call Locus.

The word comes from the Latin for "place" — the same root that gives us locale and location. In genetics, a locus is the specific position on a chromosome where a gene sits. In mathematics, it's the set of all points satisfying a particular condition. I like both of those meanings. A locus is where something belongs. It's the relationship between a thing and where it lives.

In fragrance and wine, they have a word for this: terroir. The idea that a Burgundy pinot noir tastes different from an Oregon one not because the winemaker is different but because the soil, the climate, the altitude, the particular microorganisms in that patch of earth all leave their signature in what grows there. The grape is the same species. The wine is not the same wine.

Bodycare has never thought this way. The industry sources globally, optimizes for cost, and treats ingredients as interchangeable commodities. Jojoba oil is jojoba oil. Sunflower oil is sunflower oil. Where it grew, what the soil was like, whether the farm regenerates or depletes — none of that shows up on the label or in the formulation philosophy.

We think that's a missed opportunity. Not just ethically, but functionally.

Our first chapter is Park City, Utah.

We didn't choose it for strategic reasons. I live here. My family is here. This is the landscape I know — the dry mountain air at 7,000 feet, the mineral-rich earth, the way your skin tightens within hours of stepping off a plane because the humidity drops to almost nothing.

That environment shaped our earliest products out of necessity. BARRIER, the three-ingredient balm I originally made for my son's eczema, had to work at altitude, in dry air, through harsh winters. It needed to create an occlusive layer that locked moisture in without relying on synthetic emollients or petroleum derivatives. Beeswax from a Utah beekeeper. High-oleic sunflower oil, chosen for its superior oxidative stability across wide temperature swings. Botanical glycerin to pull moisture from the air — even air this dry — and hold it against the skin.

Three ingredients. Each chosen because this specific landscape demanded them.

VOLUME, our sea salt texturizing spray, goes deeper into Utah's geological identity. Those ancient Jurassic sea salts from Sevier County contain over 60 trace minerals in a profile that no modern sea salt can replicate — because modern oceans carry the chemical legacy of the industrial age. When someone sprays VOLUME into their hair, they're applying minerals from a world that predates human pollution by 200 million years. That's not a tagline. That's a material fact about the earth this product comes from.

I gave up conventional cologne in college, once I understood what alcohol-based fragrance actually does to skin — stripping moisture, disrupting the acid mantle, delivering volatile compounds through a solvent that evaporates and desiccates. For years I simply went without. But living at altitude in Park City's dry air, where skin loses moisture just standing outside, I started wondering: what would fragrance look like if you designed it to give back to the skin instead of taking from it? BLOOM and WOODS were the answer — water-based colognes built on botanical glycerin and essential oil architecture, scents that hydrate as they evolve on your skin. A product that only makes sense if you've first asked why the conventional approach exists at all, and decided it doesn't have to.

This is what Locus means in practice. It's not about slapping a geographic label on a product. It's about letting the landscape teach you what the formulation needs to be.

The climate tells you what the skin requires. The local geology and botany offer ingredients shaped by the same forces your customers' skin will encounter. The regenerative farms in the region become your supply chain — not because "local" is a marketing word, but because proximity means relationship, accountability, traceability. You know the beekeeper. You've walked the sunflower fields. You can visit the salt mine.

Every product we make contains between 3 and 9 ingredients. We follow the precautionary principle — if an ingredient's safety and efficacy aren't established by peer-reviewed science, it doesn't go in. But within those constraints, Locus asks a further question: does this ingredient belong here? Does it have a relationship with this place?

Sometimes the answer is practical. High-oleic sunflower oil's oxidative stability makes it the right carrier for a climate of temperature extremes. Sometimes it's geological — salt from a Jurassic sea carries a mineral complexity that synthetic alternatives can't replicate. And sometimes it's philosophical — the conviction that a product rooted in a specific landscape carries an integrity that a globally-sourced commodity formulation does not.

Park City is our first chapter. It won't be our last.

As NICER grows, each new place we work in will shape a new set of formulations — informed by different climates, different soils, different botanical traditions, different problems to solve. The principles remain constant: the precautionary standard, the minimal ingredient count, the commitment to regenerative sourcing. But the ingredients themselves will change, because the land changes.

I can't tell you yet exactly where those chapters will be written. I can tell you that each one will start the same way — with a scientist walking a landscape, asking what grows here, what the earth offers, and what the skin needs in this particular place.

That's the work. Not formulating in a lab divorced from geography. Formulating in conversation with a place.

It's slower than how the industry usually does things. It's more expensive. It produces products that are harder to scale because they're tied to specific sourcing relationships rather than global commodity markets. We know all of that.

We also know what it produces: bodycare that carries the signature of somewhere real. Products you can trace back to a landscape, a farm, a deposit in the earth. Luxury that comes from a place, not just a factory.

The land tells us what it has to give. Our job is to listen.

— James Birchler, Founder + Chief Scientist

NICER is handcrafted in small batches near Park City, Utah. Every ingredient is validated by peer-reviewed science, sourced from certified organic and regenerative farms, and selected because it belongs — in the formulation and in the landscape it comes from. Learn more at feelnicer.com.