We are named
after a clay.
Halloysite is a clay mineral. It is soft, white, and it holds oil without stripping it. We shortened the word, put the clay in almost everything we make, and built the rest of the business around being able to explain ourselves.
How it started
In 2021 our founder was three weeks into a prescription retinoid and could not find a moisturiser that did not sting.
The problem was not that good creams did not exist. The problem was that every label ran to forty ingredients in six point type, half of them fragrance, and none of them explained. Working out which one was the culprit took a month and about four hundred dollars.
So the first Halloyse formula was written backwards. Start with the shortest list that could work, add nothing that could not be justified in a sentence, and print the reason next to the ingredient. That formula became Understory, and it is still the cream everything else is built around.
What we hold to
Three rules we have not broken yet.
No formula ships with more than eleven active ingredients. If something new goes in, something old comes out or we do not release it.
Every active is listed with the strength we actually use. Not "contains peptides". Three per cent, on the box and on the page.
Every jar takes a refill pouch, and every order includes a prepaid label if you would rather send the glass back than store it.
The clay
One pit, one supplier, one truck a year.
Our kaolin comes from a single pit in Western Australia. It arrives as a pale powder in paper sacks, it is milled to a fixed particle size before we see it, and every delivery comes with an assay we keep on file.
We buy roughly a tonne a year. That is not much clay, and it is the reason we can name the pit, name the miller, and tell you which batch is in the jar on your shelf. The batch number is stamped on the base, not hidden in a date code.
How we test
Slowly, and on people who are paid for it.
Never on animals. Never on customers who thought they were buying a finished product.
Bench work, six to eighteen months
A formula sits on a bench at three temperatures for at least six months before anyone puts it on skin. Most versions die here.
Patch testing, 40 people
An independent lab runs a patch test on forty volunteers, including people with a history of reacting. They are paid, and the results come back whether we like them or not.
A twelve week trial, 120 people
Twelve weeks of daily use with photographs at week nought, six and twelve. We publish the numbers we get, including the ones that came back flat.
One small batch, then wait
The first run is deliberately too small. We sell it, read every review, and only then decide whether the product stays in the range.
A note from the workshop
We are eleven people in a building in Salisbury, and we make about nine thousand jars a month.
That is small. It means we can answer an email in a day, hold a batch back if the viscosity is off, and know roughly who is on the other end of an order. It also means we run out of things. When a product says it is out of stock, it is genuinely out of stock, and the date on the page is the date the next batch comes off the bench.
Thanks for reading this far.Halloyse, Brisbane
Start with the cream
Understory is the formula the rest of the range grew out of. Eleven ingredients, all of them explained.