Ingredients Chosen with Intent

Here goes my deep dive into some of the world's most treasured aromatic botanicals,  long revered in medicine, perfumery, and ceremonial oils across ancient cultures.  This blend brings together heritage, depth, and sensory ritual in every application.  Geek out.  

MYRRH

Commiphora myrrha

Myrrh does not announce itself. It waits.

There is a particular quality to myrrh that separates it from every other resin, every other botanical, every other smell in the world of natural fragrance. It does not arrive loudly. It does not perform. It comes to you slowly ; earthy, sweet, ancient, and somehow deeply familiar, as though some part of you already knew it before you could possibly have encountered it. Not everyone notices it. But the ones who do, really do.

I was twelve, maybe thirteen. Bradford on a Saturday, which in the 1980s meant the whole street had already happened before we left the house; the mums with their aatta, the smell of charcoal pits and tandoori roti, my mother translating the world for everyone who needed it, which was most people on the street, which was what good neighbours did and nobody called it anything more than that. Jamaican uncles. Irish aunts. A quiet French man a few doors down who kept himself entirely to himself. A community that had no word for itself because it didn't need one- it was just Hollings Road.

We went to the supermarket. I went to buy art materials, because I was always buying art materials, always painting, always making something, always trying to get what was in my head onto something I could hold. And opposite, or near, the geography blurs now the way childhood does - was a shop. The kind of shop that existed then and barely exists now. Dream catchers in the window. Velvet skirts, dark purple, the kind of purple that feels like it has a sound. Hemp. Tie-dye. The door slightly open.

The smell came through that door before I reached it.

I didn't know what it was. I only knew it was the most interesting thing I had ever smelled - not punchy like patchouli, not sweet like incense sticks, but deep. Sweet and earthy and ancient and completely itself. It pulled me in the way nothing else has pulled me in before or since, in the way that only the things that are genuinely meant for you do. I stood in that shop and I didn't want to leave. I came back. I kept coming back.

And then one day it was gone. The shop had closed and I never knew its name and I never asked the smell's name either - I was about to, I was always about to - and then it was gone and I carried that unnamed smell inside me for decades.

I made Lyla's Blend®. I opened the bottle of myrrh.

And there it was. Thirty years later. Bradford on a Saturday. The door slightly open.

WHAT IT IS

Myrrh is a resin - produced by the Commiphora myrrha tree, a small, thorny, seemingly inhospitable plant native to the dry regions of Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the Arabian Peninsula. Like frankincense, it yields its medicine through wounding. The bark is cut. The tree bleeds a pale yellow liquid that darkens and hardens on exposure to air into reddish-brown tears — irregular, resinous, extraordinary.

The word myrrh derives from the Arabic murr (مُرّ) - meaning bitter. It is one of the oldest named substances in human language. The bitterness is part of it. This is not an ingredient that flatters or softens itself. It is precisely, unapologetically what it is.

THE SCIENCE

Myrrh's principal active compounds are sesquiterpenes - specifically furanoeudesma-1,3-diene and curzerene - alongside terpenoids, flavonoids, and polysaccharides. The mechanisms these compounds support are some of the most clinically relevant in dermatology:

Anti-inflammatory activity: Myrrh sesquiterpenes inhibit pro-inflammatory cytokine pathways, reducing inflammatory signalling at the skin surface. Studies demonstrate measurable reduction in markers of acute and chronic skin inflammation.

Antimicrobial protection: Documented broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity against common skin pathogens - including Staphylococcus aureus and Candida albicans - making it clinically relevant for compromised, reactive, and barrier-damaged skin.

Wound healing and tissue repair: Myrrh has demonstrated acceleration of wound closure and tissue regeneration in multiple studies, supporting its thousands of years of empirical use as a wound medicine. Its mechanism involves both antimicrobial protection of the wound environment and direct stimulation of fibroblast activity - the cells responsible for producing collagen and closing tissue.

Antioxidant activity: Myrrh resin demonstrates free radical scavenging activity, contributing to protection against oxidative stress at the skin surface.

Key published research:

• Dolara P, Corte B, Ghelardini C, Pugliese AM, Cerbai E, Menichetti S, Lo Nostro A. Local anaesthetic, antibacterial and antifungal properties of sesquiterpenes from myrrh. Planta Med. 2000 May;66(4):356-8. doi: 10.1055/s-2000-8532. PMID: 10865454.Tipton DA et al. In vitro cytotoxic and anti-inflammatory effects of myrrh extract on human gingival fibroblasts and epithelial cells. Toxicology in Vitro. 2003. PubMed
• Sheir Z, Nasr AA, Massoud A, Salama O, Badra GA, El-Shennawy H, Hassan N, Hammad SM. A safe, effective, herbal antischistosomal therapy derived from myrrh. Am J Trop Med Hyg. 2001 Dec;65(6):700-4. doi: 10.4269/ajtmh.2001.65.700. PMID: 11791960.  
• Shen T et al. The genus Commiphora: a review of its traditional uses, phytochemistry and pharmacology. Journal of Ethnopharmacology. 2012.
• Shen T, Li GH, Wang XN, Lou HX. The genus Commiphora: a review of its traditional uses, phytochemistry and pharmacology. J Ethnopharmacol. 2012 Jul 13;142(2):319-30. doi: 10.1016/j.jep.2012.05.025. Epub 2012 May 21. PMID: 22626923.

THE HERITAGE

Egypt

Myrrh appears in the Ebers Papyrus - circa 1550 BCE, one of the oldest surviving medical documents in human history, a 110-page scroll containing over 700 prescriptions and remedies. It is listed for wound treatment, skin disease, and - significantly - for conditions relating to women's health and the menstrual cycle. The Egyptians also used myrrh in the embalming process: its antimicrobial and preservative properties slowed decomposition, protected the body from decay, held things together that time would otherwise dissolve.

There is something in that I find extraordinary. An ingredient that heals the living and preserves the dead. That holds things. That keeps things from being lost.

The Egyptians also burned myrrh as kyphi - a sacred incense blend used in temple ritual, described by Plutarch as having the power to soothe anxiety, clarify the mind, and induce vivid dreams. They were not wrong. They simply didn't have the neurochemistry to explain why.

Greece and Rome

Hippocrates - often called the father of Western medicine - prescribed myrrh for wound healing. Dioscorides dedicated significant attention to it in De Materia Medica (1st century CE), describing its use for skin ulcers, infections, and wound repair. Pliny the Elder documented its extraordinary commercial value in Naturalis Historia - at the height of the Roman Empire, myrrh was one of the most expensive traded commodities in the known world.

Theophrastus, the Greek botanist and student of Aristotle, wrote about myrrh in Historia Plantarum - noting the distinctive quality of the resin, the way it was harvested, and the geography of its origin. These were not casual observations. These were the careful records of people who understood that something significant was happening when myrrh was applied to the body.

The Biblical and Sacred Tradition

Myrrh is one of the most frequently mentioned botanicals in the Bible -appearing in both the Old and New Testaments. It was one of the three gifts of the Magi. It was used to anoint the bodies of the dead - including, in the Gospel of John, the body of Jesus. It was the perfume that Mary Magdalene carried. In the Song of Solomon it appears as the smell of the beloved, the smell of desire, the smell of something holy.

In Islamic tradition, myrrh (murr) has been used medicinally for centuries - referenced in classical Islamic pharmacology texts and used in traditional Unani medicine for wound healing, oral health, and skin conditions.

Women's Health - A Note on Resonance

Across multiple ancient medical traditions - Egyptian, Greek, Arabic, and Ayurvedic - myrrh was documented specifically for its use in women's health: supporting menstrual regularity, easing menstrual pain, and addressing conditions of the female reproductive system. This is consistent enough across traditions to be clinically significant.

I was twelve or thirteen when I first smelled myrrh. I didn't know any of this then. I only knew that something in that smell recognised me. I understand now that this was not imagination. Myrrh has been accompanying women through the changes in their bodies for three thousand years. It simply hadn't told me its name yet.

IN TRADITIONAL CHINESE MEDICINE

Mò Yào · 没药 · The Medicine of No Words

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, myrrh is known as Mò Yào (没药) - and it is almost always discussed alongside its partner, Rǔ Xiāng (乳香), frankincense. The two resins have been paired in Chinese medical formulation for centuries. They are, in TCM understanding, complementary -each amplifying what the other brings.

In accessible terms: Mò Yào is understood to support circulation at the tissue level, help the body clear stagnation where healing has become stuck, reduce pain and swelling, and actively promote the regeneration of damaged tissue. It is a medicine for wounds - physical, and in the poetic language of classical Chinese medicine, emotional too.

Where healing has stalled. Where something old needs to be cleared before something new can form. Where the body needs permission to repair. That is where myrrh belongs.

In Lyla's Blend®, frankincense and myrrh are both present - the same pairing that Chinese medicine has used for centuries, that Egyptian physicians employed, that the Magi carried across a desert. I did not plan that parallel consciously. I planned it the way you plan the things that are true before you understand them.

For those who wish to explore the classical literature further:

→ Shén Nóng Běn Cǎo Jīng (神农本草经) -Divine Farmer's Classic of Materia Medica, circa 200 CE.
→ Běn Cǎo Gāng Mù (本草纲目) - Li Shizhen's Compendium of Materia Medica, 1596.
→ Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, 1st century CE.
→ The Ebers Papyrus, circa 1550 BCE.

WHY IT'S IN LYLA'S BLEND®

I use myrrh at the maximum concentration permitted under UK cosmetic regulations. Not because I had to. Because I wanted to.

Of all the essential oils in this formulation - and I chose every one of them with the same rigour I bring to a clinical decision - myrrh is the one that is entirely, unreservedly mine. It is the smell of a shop I can no longer find in a city that has changed beyond recognition, of a door slightly open on a Saturday afternoon in Bradford, of a twelve-year-old girl with paint on her hands who didn't know yet what she was looking for but walked through anyway.

I know now. It was this.

Myrrh has been used to heal skin, to preserve what matters, and to accompany human beings through the most significant moments of their lives - birth, death, prayer, grief, transformation -for over three thousand years. It is antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, and wound-healing by modern evidence. It is a mover of stagnation, a restorer of what has been depleted, by classical understanding.

And it smells, to me, of everything that formed me before I had language for any of it.

That is why it is in Lyla's Blend®. That is why it will always be in Lyla's Blend®.

Lyla's Blend® · Formulated like medicine. Felt like skin. 

SANDALWOOD

Santalum album - Mysore Grade

Some things are not taught. They are transmitted.

My mother worked three jobs.

Pakistani cloth shop in the morning. School dinner lady at lunch. Back to the shop. Then home - briefly, barely- before the neighbourhood children arrived for Quran lessons, because that was the kind of woman she was. She had come from a family of means in Pakistan and lived her childhood like a princess in Malaysia.  At age 13, her childhood was cut short when her father died suddenly. Overnight, wealth became poverty, and she came to England and built something from nothing, from sheer refusal, from a generosity so complete it sometimes cost her everything she had.

She never called it sacrifice. She would not have recognised the word applied to herself. It was simply what you did. You worked. You gave. You made sure your children had what the street's children didn't; holidays nobody else took, opportunities nobody else offered, a mother who read and wrote English and used both in service of everyone around her, because that was just being a good neighbour and it didn't need a name.

She was battle axe and boundless warmth in the same breath. Complicated in the way that only the strongest people are complicated.  Not simple enough to summarise, too full of light and shadow to reduce to either.   She had a spark she buried under the weight of keeping everything going. It surfaces in me sometimes, unexpectedly, and I recognise it immediately. Hers.

She burned incense at the khatms.

I know now that it was sandalwood.

THE KHATM

A khatm is a gathering for collective prayer.  A completion.  My mother would invite the women of the street, whoever came, and they would sit together and recite and count prayer beads and the room would fill with something that had no clinical name at the time but which I now understand, as a GP and as a TCM practitioner, to have been one of the most sophisticated nervous system interventions available.

Rhythmic repetition. Breath regulation. Collective presence. Social connection. The smell of sandalwood moving through the house.

We did not call it nervous system regulation. We called it a khatm. We called it being together. We called it the thing that happened before the extraordinary food arrived; because there was always extraordinary food, and it was always the detail everyone mentioned first when they remembered those evenings, and that was entirely correct because the food was magnificent.

But the sandalwood was doing something too. We just didn't have that language yet.

I was the one who carried the incense around the house before the guests arrived. My mother asked me, but I also chose it. Revelled in it- felt something in the act that I couldn't articulate at eight or nine years old but which I can name precisely now. It was reset. The physical, sensory declaration that what came before this moment was finished and what comes next is different. Old ending. New beginning. Not woo. Not ritual for ritual's sake. A concrete, embodied, olfactory full stop , followed by an opening.

I do it now. Before something matters, I light something. I carry it through the rooms.

Lyla does it too. Without being asked. Without explanation. She just knows.

Of all my mother's gifts,  and there were many, and they were significant,  this might be the one I am most grateful for. Not the holidays, not the three jobs, not the Quran lessons for the neighbourhood children. This. The understanding, transmitted without words, that a smell can mark a threshold. That crossing from one state to another can be made deliberate. That the body deserves to be told when something new is beginning.

Lyla wins, by the way. Of all of us, she carries it furthest. Her grandmother would have been insufferably proud.

WHAT IT IS

Sandalwood essential oil is steam distilled from the heartwood of Santalum album — the Indian sandalwood tree, native to southern India and the most prized species in the genus. The tree must reach a minimum of fifteen years of maturity before its heartwood develops the concentration of active compounds that makes the oil worth distilling. The finest grade — Mysore sandalwood — comes from the Karnataka region of southern India and is considered the global standard for quality, complexity, and therapeutic potency.

Lyla's Blend® uses Mysore-grade Santalum album. Not because it is the most expensive option, though it is. Because it is the only grade that contains the full spectrum of active compounds at the concentrations required for the formulation to do what it is designed to do. Mysore sandalwood is sustainably cultivated — an important consideration for an ingredient whose wild populations have been significantly depleted by centuries of demand.

The smell of Mysore sandalwood is unlike any other. Warm. Woody. Creamy. Grounding in a way that operates below the level of thought — you don't decide to feel settled by it. You simply are.

THE SCIENCE

Sandalwood's principal active compound is alpha-santalol — a sesquiterpene alcohol that accounts for the majority of its documented pharmacological effects. Beta-santalol and other sesquiterpenes contribute additional activity. Together they produce a profile of effects that spans dermatology, neuroscience, and microbiology.

On the skin

Anti-inflammatory activity: Alpha-santalol demonstrates measurable inhibition of pro-inflammatory pathways, reducing cytokine-mediated inflammation at the skin surface. Relevant for reactive, sensitised, and barrier-compromised skin.

Antimicrobial protection: Documented activity against Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, and Candida albicans — common pathogens in skin infection and barrier disruption.

Anti-proliferative effects: Alpha-santalol has demonstrated inhibition of abnormal cell proliferation in multiple studies — of interest in the context of conditions involving hyperkeratosis and inflammatory skin disease.

Tyrosinase inhibition: Emerging evidence suggests sandalwood compounds may inhibit tyrosinase — the enzyme involved in melanin production — contributing to skin tone evenness and clarity. This mechanism is the subject of active dermatological research.

Collagen and elastin support: Studies indicate sandalwood extract supports fibroblast activity and may contribute to maintaining skin structural integrity over time.

On the nervous system

Alpha-santalol and the olfactory pathway: Inhalation studies have demonstrated that alpha-santalol produces measurable physiological changes — reduced physiological stress markers, attenuated autonomic nervous system arousal, and subjective reports of calm — through olfactory receptor activation and subsequent limbic system modulation. The smell of sandalwood reaches the amygdala. It lands in the part of the brain that processes threat and safety. And it says: safe.

This is the mechanism beneath what my mother's khatm gatherings were doing. The prayer, the community, the breath, the beads — and underneath all of it, sandalwood telling the nervous system, repeatedly, that this was a safe place. That the body could soften here.

Key published research:

   ·  Broad Phytochemistry & Bioactivity Review

·       Sharifi-Rad, J., et al. (2022). Santalum Genus: Phytochemical constituents, biological activities and health promoting-effects. Zeitschrift für Naturforschung C, 78(1-2), 9–25.      View Peer-Reviewed Study on PubMed

·        Dermatological Therapeutics & Skin Barrier Evidence

·       Moy, R. L., & Levenson, C. (2017). Sandalwood Album Oil as a Botanical Therapeutic in Dermatology. The Journal of Clinical and Aesthetic Dermatology, 10(10), 34–39.   Read Free Full Text on PubMed Central     

 ·  Anti-Pollution, Anti-Aging & Cellular Protection

·       François-Newton, V., et al. (2021). Antioxidant and Anti-Aging Potential of Indian Sandalwood Oil against Environmental Stressors In Vitro and Ex Vivo. Cosmetics, 8(2), 53.    View Open-Access Paper on MDPI  

·        Oncological & Chemopreventive Pharmacotherapy

·       Santha, S., & Dwivedi, C. (2015). Anticancer Effects of Sandalwood (Santalum album). Anticancer Research, 35(6), 3137–3145.      View Published Paper on PubMed

THE HERITAGE

The Silk Road and the Sanskrit Texts

Sandalwood is one of the most widely travelled botanicals in human history. It moved along the ancient Silk Road from southern India into Central Asia, Persia, the Arab world, and eventually into Europe. It was traded as both a luxury commodity and a medicine — simultaneously precious and functional, which is the particular quality that sustains a botanical across millennia.

In Sanskrit texts, sandalwood appears as chandana (चन्दन) — referenced in classical literature, religious poetry, and medical texts over two thousand years old. It was used to anoint the bodies of kings. It was applied to temple walls. It was prescribed for fevers, skin inflammation, and conditions of excess heat in the body. It was burned in ritual to purify spaces and calm the mind of the practitioner. The distinction between medicine and ceremony barely existed,  because the body and the spirit were not considered separate systems requiring separate treatment.

That is an understanding Lyla's Blend® shares.

Ayurveda — Chandana and the Cooling of Fire

In Ayurvedic medicine, sandalwood is principally understood as a pitta-reducing botanical. Pitta is the energetic principle associated with fire, heat, inflammation, and intensity — in the body and in the mind. Sandalwood cools. It calms the kind of heat that manifests as inflamed skin, reactive temperament, stress-driven depletion. It is prescribed in classical Ayurvedic formulation for skin disease, fever, urinary conditions, and anxiety — always with this underlying principle of cooling what has become too hot, calming what has become too reactive.

The Charaka Samhita and the Sushruta Samhita — the two foundational texts of Ayurvedic medicine — both reference chandana extensively. It is one of the most consistently documented botanicals in a tradition spanning over two thousand years of clinical observation.

Ancient Egypt and the Arab World

Sandalwood was present in ancient Egyptian ritual and medicine — imported along trade routes at significant cost, used in temple ceremony and embalming preparations. Arab physicians documented it in classical Islamic pharmacology, and it appears in Unani medicine — the Greco-Arab medical tradition that synthesised the knowledge of Greek, Persian, and Indian medicine into a coherent clinical system — as a treatment for skin inflammation and as a mental and spiritual clarifier.

Ibn Sina — Avicenna — referenced sandalwood in Al-Qanun fi'l-Tibb for its cooling, anti-inflammatory, and skin-supporting properties. The same man who prescribed sweet almond oil, working from the same principle: the body has intelligence, plants have chemistry, and the task of the physician is to bring them into useful conversation.

IN TRADITIONAL CHINESE MEDICINE

Tán Xiāng · 檀香 · Fragrant Sandalwood

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, sandalwood is known as Tán Xiāng (檀香) — literally, fragrant wood. In accessible terms: it is understood to regulate the flow of Qi — the body's vital energy — particularly in the chest and upper body, where stress, grief, and emotional tension tend to accumulate and stagnate. It calms the mind. It opens what has become constricted. It is used for conditions where the body is holding too much — too much tension, too much heat, too much unprocessed experience.

In the context of Lyla's Blend®, Tán Xiāng contributes to the formulation's intention of nervous system regulation — addressing, through both the olfactory pathway and topical application, the physical residue of stress that accumulates in the body over time.

For those who wish to explore the classical literature:

→ Shén Nóng Běn Cǎo Jīng (神农本草经) — Divine Farmer's Classic of Materia Medica, circa 200 CE. Read more
→ Charaka Samhita — Ayurvedic foundational text, circa 400–200 BCE. Read more
→ Sushruta Samhita — classical Ayurvedic surgical and medical text. Read more
→ Ibn Sina, Al-Qanun fi'l-Tibb (The Canon of Medicine), 1025 CE. Read more

WHY IT'S IN LYLA'S BLEND®

Of all the oils in this formulation, sandalwood is the one that most purely represents what Lyla's Blend® is about.

Not because of the alpha-santalol or the pitta-reducing classification or the Silk Road heritage — though all of that is real and all of it matters. But because of a terraced house in Bradford, and a woman who worked four jobs and never called it sacrifice, and the way she filled a room with prayer and community and the smell of something burning and the promise of extraordinary food at the end of it.

She was not doing aromatherapy. She was not practicing nervous system regulation. She was doing what she knew — gathering people, making space sacred, marking the threshold between ordinary time and something more deliberate. She was doing what her mother had done and her mother before that, through a lineage of women who understood, without clinical language, that the body needs to be told when it is safe. When it can soften. When the old is finished and the new is permitted to begin.

I carry the incense around the house now. Before something important. Before guests. Before I need to reset. The physical, embodied act of saying — this moment is different. Something new is beginning.

Lyla does it too. She is seven. She has never been told why. She simply knows.

My mother would not have called herself a healer. She would have called herself a good neighbour. But she transmitted something — through smell, through ceremony, through the particular quality of her presence in a room — that I am still receiving. That my daughter is already carrying.

Sandalwood, for me, is not an ingredient. It is inheritance.

Humans are not black or white. They are shades of light and shadow. My mother was both, fully, without apology. The light she gave me is in every bottle of Lyla's Blend®.

This page is for her.

Lyla's Blend® · Formulated like medicine. Felt like skin.

 

NEROLI

Citrus aurantium - Steam Distilled Bitter Orange Blossom

Tunisia · Highest Grade

Some smells do not live in the nose. They live in the body. In the part of you that was formed before you had words for anything.

I was under ten years old. My father was not often present,  but when he was, he arrived fully. Silk scarves. A suit pressed with the kind of care that said something about who he was, regardless of where he had been or what the week had cost him. He worked in a restaurant. He left the house looking like he owned the city. That particular combination — the effort, the elegance, the silk — came with a smell I could not name. I simply knew it as him. As the version of him I wanted to stay longer. As the smell of a man who, in those moments, was entirely himself.

I was too young to ask what it was. And then the years changed things.  Unemployment took something from him quietly, the way it does, and the scarves were folded away and the smell went with them. When he came to live with me, at my insistence, in the last years of his life, he smelled of the things a home smells of — children, cooking, toothpaste, warm milk, the particular sweetness of a house that is genuinely lived in. He had returned to himself in a different way by then. A gentler way. A way that smelled of belonging rather than of the world outside.

He died with me. Those were the happiest years of my life.

It was only after the grief — after losing both my parents, after the particular silence that follows that kind of loss, after I came back to myself and began making Lyla's Blend® — that I opened a bottle of neroli and understood what I was holding.

That was him. Before the scarves were folded away. That was the smell of a man who was entirely himself.

I did not choose neroli for this reason. I chose it because it is extraordinary - scientifically, historically, sensorially.  But it found its way into my hands through something older than science. Through a memory stored not in the mind but in the body, in the place where smell lives before language gets anywhere near it.

There is another flower still to come — Chamelli, jasmine, the name my father gave me, his flower among four daughters. That story is not ready yet. When it is, you will find it here.

WHAT IT IS

Neroli essential oil is steam distilled from the blossoms of the bitter orange tree — Citrus aurantium — not the sweet orange, and not from the fruit, the leaves, or the wood, but from the flower alone. It takes approximately 1,000 kilograms of hand-picked blossoms to produce one kilogram of neroli essential oil. The blossoms must be harvested by hand, in the early morning, before the heat opens them fully and the volatile compounds begin to escape.

Lyla's Blend® uses neroli sourced from Tunisia — the finest producing region in the world for Citrus aurantium, where the combination of soil, climate, and generational expertise in distillation produces an oil of a quality and complexity that simply cannot be replicated elsewhere. Tunisian neroli is the standard against which all other neroli is measured.

A note on price — offered not as justification but as information, because you deserve to know what you are holding. A 10ml bottle of genuine, high-grade neroli essential oil costs in the region of several hundred pounds. If it does not, it is not neroli — or not neroli alone. It is either adulterated, synthetic, or diluted beyond the point where the chemistry that matters is still present. The price of real neroli is inseparable from what makes it real. Lyla's Blend® uses the real thing. That decision was never in question.

THE SCIENCE

Neroli's principal active compounds are linalool and linalyl acetate — alongside geraniol, nerol, beta-pinene, and farnesol. Each contributes something distinct. Together they produce one of the most pharmacologically interesting essential oils in existence.

The nervous system mechanism — what actually happens

Linalool is the compound responsible for what you feel within moments of neroli's application — and it is not placebo, not suggestion, not the power of expectation. It is neurochemistry.

Linalool has documented activity at GABA-A receptors — the same receptor system targeted by benzodiazepine medications prescribed for anxiety. It modulates these receptors in a way that produces measurable anxiolytic, calming, and sedative effects — without the pharmacological risks associated with pharmaceutical intervention. Multiple peer-reviewed studies have confirmed this mechanism, including inhalation studies demonstrating measurable physiological changes in heart rate, skin conductance, and self-reported anxiety levels.

This is why the calm that settles on you when you apply Lyla's Blend® is not imagination. It has a receptor. It has a pathway. It has a mechanism that modern neuroscience has now named — though traditional medicine understood the effect centuries before it could explain it.

Linalyl acetate contributes anti-inflammatory and antispasmodic effects — relevant both for skin reactivity and for the physical tension that stress deposits in the body.

Farnesol demonstrates antimicrobial activity and has shown promise in supporting skin barrier integrity and reducing inflammatory cytokine expression.

Geraniol contributes antioxidant and antimicrobial properties, adding a layer of environmental protection to the formulation.

On the skin specifically

• Documented antioxidant activity — neutralising free radical damage at the skin surface
• Antimicrobial protection against common skin pathogens
• Anti-inflammatory effects reducing skin reactivity and redness
• Emerging evidence for collagen-supporting activity through fibroblast stimulation
• Documented improvement in skin elasticity and hydration markers

Key published research:

Moradi, M., et al. (2021). The effects of Citrus aurantium on anxiety and agitation: A parallel randomized placebo-controlled trial. BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies, 21, 172.  Read Free Full Text on PubMed Central

Gong, M., et al. (2020). Effects of Citrus aurantium aroma on anxiety: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Journal of Affective Disorders, 274, 1028–1040  View Study on PubMed

 Elsharif, S. A., et al. (2017). Modulatory potential of linalool derivatives on GABA-A receptors. Frontiers in Chemistry, 5, 46. Read Open-Access Paper on Frontiers

 Linck, V. M., et al. (2009). Inhaled linalool-induced sedation in mice. Phytomedicine, 16(4), 303–307.👉 View Study on PubMed

THE HERITAGE

A Name and a Princess

The name neroli has a story, and it is exactly the kind of story this oil deserves.

In the late 17th century, Anne Marie Orsini, Princess of Nerola,  a small town in the hills outside Rome, discovered the essential oil of bitter orange blossom and made it entirely her own. She used it to scent her gloves, her bathwater, her correspondence, the fabric of her clothes. The scent became so associated with her presence, her court, her particular quality of elegance, that it took her name. Neroli. A princess so defined by a smell that the smell became her.

It subsequently became the defining fragrance of European aristocracy.  Worn by royalty, distilled for courts, considered among the most refined and precious botanical extracts available. It remains one of the foundational notes in classical fine perfumery. Eau de Cologne, one of the oldest fragrance traditions in Europe, was originally built around neroli as its primary note.

Four hundred years later, it is still irreplaceable. There is no synthetic that does what real neroli does. Not completely. Not in the places that matter.

Ancient Egypt and the Arab World

Long before the Princess of Nerola gave it her name, bitter orange blossom was used across North Africa and the Arab world for skin rejuvenation, nervous system calming, and ritual preparation. In traditional Arab medicine, orange blossom water — ma' al-zahar (ماء الزهر) — was used medicinally and ceremonially, applied to the skin and consumed as a remedy for anxiety and heart palpitations. It remains in use across North Africa and the Levant today - in weddings, in religious ceremony, in the kitchen, in medicine; a botanical so woven into the cultural fabric that it needs no introduction in the countries where it grows.

Tunisia,  where Lyla's Blend®'s neroli originates,  sits at the centre of this tradition. The bitter orange groves of northern Tunisia have been producing blossom for distillation for centuries. The knowledge of when to pick, how to handle, how to distill without destroying what makes neroli itself.   This is generational knowledge, held in families, passed through practice rather than text.

Traditional Chinese Medicine — an adjacent note

Neroli does not appear directly in the classical Chinese materia medica — bitter orange (Zhi Shi, 枳实, and Zhi Ke, 枳壳) is present, but in its unripe fruit form rather than its blossom. What TCM does offer, however, is a framework for understanding what neroli does: in Chinese medical thinking, its effect on the nervous system would be understood as calming the Shen (神) -  the spirit, the mind, the aspect of consciousness that becomes disturbed under stress and returns to stillness under the right conditions. The GABA-A mechanism that Western neuroscience identified in linalool and the Shen-calming effect that classical Chinese medicine describes are, I believe, two languages attempting to describe the same thing.

For those who wish to go deeper:

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) Historical Authority, Li, S. (1596). Běn Cǎo Gāng Mù (Compendium of Materia Medica). Historical documentation of Bitter Orange (Citrus aurantium / Zhǐ Shí) in classical pharmacopeia. View Historical Record at the Library of Congress

The Clinical Essential Oil Safety Standard, Tisserand, R., & Young, R. (2014). Essential Oil Safety: A Guide for Health Care Professionals (2nd ed.). Churchill Livingstone / Elsevier. View Reference Text on ScienceDirect

Ethnobotanical & Clinical Aromatherapy Reference, Battaglia, S. (2018). The Complete Guide to Aromatherapy (3rd ed., Vol. 1 - Foundations & Materia Medica). Perfect Potion Publishers. View Citation Record at the International Federation of Aromatherapists

WHY IT'S IN LYLA'S BLEND®

Lyla's Blend® is designed to work on the skin and on the nervous system simultaneously. Every formulation decision was made with both in mind. Neroli earns its place twice over: once in the dermatology, once in the neuroscienc  and I would have chosen it for either reason alone.

But the truth is I chose it for a third reason first, before I could articulate either of the others.

I chose it because it smelled like something I already knew. Like the memory of a man in a pressed suit with a silk scarf, standing in a doorway, entirely himself. Like the version of him that existed before life asked too much of him. Like something I had been carrying without knowing its name.

Making Lyla's Blend® gave me the name.

It also gave me something I did not expect;  the understanding that returning to yourself is not a linear journey. My father returned to himself in my home, in the last years of his life, surrounded by the smell of children and cooking and the ordinary extraordinary business of a house full of love. I returned to myself after grief, in my own kitchen, with my hands in a formulation that smelled of everything that had ever mattered.

The brand is called Lyla's Blend®. Lyla is my daughter. But every oil in it carries someone. Myrrh carries a Bradford Saturday and a shop that no longer exists. Sandalwood carries my mother's prayer gatherings and the smell of ceremony before I knew what ceremony was. Neroli carries my father - silk scarves, a pressed suit, a smell that arrived before I had language and waited, patiently, until I was ready to find it again.

There is another flower still to come. My father called me Chamelli — jasmine. His flower among four daughters. When that oil finds its formulation, you will find that story here.

Lyla's Blend® · Medicine, applied to the skin.

 

FRANKINCENSE

Boswellia sacra · Boswellia serrata

Before medicine had a name, there was frankincense.

There are ingredients that perform. And then there are ingredients that carry the weight of human history - resins that moved along ancient trade routes, were burned in temples, prescribed by physicians, carried across deserts as objects of value exceeding gold. Frankincense is both. It is the only ingredient in Lyla's Blend® that appears in the sacred texts of multiple world religions, in the earliest documented medical literature of at least three civilisations, and in peer-reviewed dermatological research published within the last decade. That is not coincidence. That is a track record spanning three thousand years.

Lyla's Blend® contains not one but two species of Boswellia -  sacra and serrata - because they are not the same thing. They share a name, a genus, and a family of active compounds. But they come from different soils, different traditions, and they bring different things to a formulation. Understanding the distinction is the difference between using frankincense and understanding it.

BOSWELLIA SACRA

The Sacred Resin · Silver Frankincense · Olibanum

Boswellia sacra grows in one of the most inhospitable landscapes on earth; the limestone mountains of Dhofar in southern Oman, and across into Yemen and the Horn of Africa. It does not grow easily. It grows in rock, in heat, in near-drought conditions, in places where little else survives. And perhaps because of this, perhaps because the tree has learned to endure - what it produces when wounded is extraordinary.

To harvest frankincense, the bark is cut. The tree bleeds. What emerges is a milky-white resin.  Liquid at first, hardening on exposure to air into the pale, crystalline tears that have been traded, burned, and revered for over five thousand years. The finest grade — Hojari — comes exclusively from the Dhofar region. It is sometimes called Silver Frankincense. Historically, it was reserved for royalty and sacred ceremony. It still commands the highest price of any frankincense on the global market.

The ancient trade routes that carried it north — through Arabia, across the Levant, into Egypt and Rome — are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Frankincense Trail. Camel caravans, months of travel, extraordinary risk — all for this resin. At its peak, frankincense was more economically significant than oil. Empires were sustained by its trade. Wars were fought along its routes.

What the science says

The chemistry of Boswellia sacra is dominated not by the boswellic acids that characterise its Indian cousin, but by a compound called incensole acetate — and what incensole acetate does is remarkable.

In a landmark 2008 study published in the FASEB Journal, researchers demonstrated that incensole acetate activates TRPV3 ion channels in the brain — producing measurable anxiolytic and antidepressant effects in animal models. This was the first scientific confirmation of something that priests, monks, and ritual practitioners had known empirically for millennia: burning frankincense changes how you feel. It calms. It opens something. It was not imagination. It was neurochemistry.

When applied to skin, Boswellia sacra's terpene-rich profile — alpha-pinene, alpha-thujene, octyl acetate — contributes anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial activity. It supports the skin's barrier function and brings a calming effect that operates on multiple levels simultaneously: at the surface of the skin and, through olfactory pathways, within the nervous system itself.

I chose Boswellia sacra for Lyla's Blend® because of that dual action. The formulation is designed to support skin and regulate the nervous system — and sacra does both, simultaneously, within a single breath of application.

The heritage

Egypt burned it in temples to Amun. The Israelites used it in the Tabernacle — it is mentioned by name in the Book of Exodus. The three Magi carried it to Bethlehem. The Romans imported it in quantities that made Oman's Dhofar coast one of the most strategically significant territories in the ancient world. Islamic tradition has used it medicinally and ritually for over fourteen centuries. The Queen of Sheba, whose kingdom sat at the heart of the frankincense-producing region, likely traded in it.

There is something quietly extraordinary about that lineage. To hold this resin is to hold something that has passed through the hands of pharaohs, physicians, priests, and merchants across every major ancient civilisation. It has outlasted every empire that prized it. It is still here. Still doing what it always did.

BOSWELLIA SERRATA

Indian Frankincense · Shallaki · The Clinician's Resin

If Boswellia sacra is the sacred resin — ancient, ceremonial, sensory — then Boswellia serrata is the clinician's frankincense. It comes from the dry forests of India, and it is the species that modern pharmaceutical research has studied most extensively. The reason is its boswellic acid content — and specifically one compound that has earned frankincense a serious place in contemporary anti-inflammatory science.

What the science says

AKBA — 3-O-acetyl-11-keto-β-boswellic acid — is the most pharmacologically active compound in Boswellia serrata, and it has a precise, documented mechanism: it is a potent inhibitor of 5-lipoxygenase (5-LOX), the enzyme responsible for synthesising leukotrienes — inflammatory signalling molecules involved in conditions ranging from asthma to arthritis to inflammatory skin disease.

To put that plainly: AKBA blocks one of the body's key inflammatory pathways at the enzymatic level. This is not a vague "anti-inflammatory" claim. It is a mechanism, a target, and a documented effect.

For skin specifically, boswellic acids have been shown to:

• Inhibit matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) — the enzymes that degrade collagen and elastin, accelerating visible skin ageing
• Reduce inflammatory cytokine activity in skin tissue
• Support repair in compromised and barrier-damaged skin
• Demonstrate antimicrobial activity against common skin pathogens

Key published research:

 Ammon, H. P. T. (2006). Boswellic acids in chronic inflammatory diseases. Planta Medica, 72(12), 1100–1116.  View Study on PubMed

Siddiqui, M. Z. (2011). Boswellia serrata, a potential antiinflammatory agent: an overview. Indian Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, 73(3), 255–261. Read Free Full Text on PubMed Central

Moussaieff, A., et al. (2008). Incensole acetate, an incense component, elicits psychoactivity by activating TRPV3 channels in the brain. The FASEB Journal, 22(8), 3024–3034. Read Study on PubMed

Hamidpour, R., et al. (2013). Frankincense (Rǔ Xiāng; Boswellia species): From traditional applications to novel phytotherapy. Journal of Traditional and Complementary Medicine, 3(4), 221–226. Read Free Full Text on PubMed Central

The heritage

Boswellia serrata has been used in Ayurvedic medicine for over two thousand years under the name Shallaki (शल्लकी). It appears in both the Charaka Samhita and the Sushruta Samhita — the two foundational texts of Ayurvedic medicine — prescribed for inflammatory joint conditions, wound healing, and skin disease. The same compound that modern pharmacology identified as a 5-LOX inhibitor, Ayurvedic physicians were prescribing — correctly and effectively — over two millennia before the enzyme was named or the mechanism understood.

That is not mysticism. That is empirical medicine, accumulated over centuries of careful clinical observation, now validated by modern biochemistry. The two traditions arrived at the same conclusion by different routes.

IN TRADITIONAL CHINESE MEDICINE

Rǔ Xiāng · 乳香 · Milky Fragrance

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, frankincense is known as Rǔ Xiāng (乳香) — literally, milky fragrance, named for the appearance of the fresh resin as it weeps from the cut bark.

In accessible terms: Rǔ Xiāng is understood to support circulation at the skin and tissue level, help the body clear stagnation where healing has stalled, relieve pain, reduce swelling, and encourage the kind of deep tissue repair that follows injury or chronic inflammation. It is one of the classical medicines for wounds that are slow to close, skin that is slow to restore.

It is almost always paired with Mò Yào (没药) — Myrrh — in classical formulation. The two resins have been used together for thousands of years in Chinese medicine for wound healing and skin repair. In Lyla's Blend®, both are present. That pairing is not accidental.

For those who wish to go deeper into the classical literature,  these are among the most beautiful and significant texts in the history of medicine:

Shén Nóng Běn Cǎo Jīng (神农本草经). Divine Farmer's Classic of Materia Medica (Circa 200 CE). View Historical Record at Library of Congress

Li Shizhen (1596). Běn Cǎo Gāng Mù (Compendium of Materia Medica). View UNESCO Memory of the World Register

 Charaka Samhita (चरकसंहिता). Ayurvedic Foundational Medical Text (Circa 400 BCE–200 CE). View Digital Archive at WHO / AYUSH

 Sushruta Samhita (सुश्रुतसंहिता). Ayurvedic Surgical & Botanical Treatise (Circa 600 BCE). View Digitized Translation at Internet Archive

Dioscorides (1st Century CE). De Materia Medica. View Digitized Manuscript at Library of Congress

WHY IT'S IN LYLA'S BLEND®

I chose both species deliberately — because they are not interchangeable, and because together they do something neither does alone.

Boswellia sacra brings the sensory and neurological dimension — that quality of calm that settles on you within moments of application, operating through olfactory pathways to the nervous system. It is why this formulation feels different to use, not just different on skin.

Boswellia serrata brings the clinical anti-inflammatory precision — the AKBA, the MMP inhibition, the documented barrier support. It is doing measurable biochemical work beneath the surface.

As a GP, I work daily with patients whose skin reflects what is happening inside — stress, hormonal dysregulation, inflammation, depletion. As a TCM practitioner, I understand the same disruption through a different lens — stagnation, deficiency, heat. Frankincense, in both its species, addresses both. It is one of very few ingredients that earns its place in a formulation designed to work at the level of the skin and the nervous system simultaneously.

But if I am honest about why frankincense is here, truly honest, beneath the science and the heritage and the clinical rationale,  it is because of a question I could not stop asking.

Three kings. Wise men. Men who had, by any account, access to everything. And they looked at a newborn child,  at what they understood to be one of the most significant arrival in human history,  and they decided he was worth the most precious thing they carried. Not gold alone. Not jewels. This. A resin wept from a wounded tree, carried across a desert, offered as the highest form of reverence they knew.

I am not a theologian but I give space to the story and the question it asks is one I find genuinely compelling: what did they know that we are still learning? What did ancient peoples understand about this resin , its capacity to heal, to calm, to open something in the human body and the human spirit - that made it worthy of that moment?

Modern biochemistry has been answering that question slowly, paper by paper, for the last thirty years. The TRPV3 channels. The 5-LOX inhibition. The neurological calm. The tissue repair.

They already knew. They just didn't have that language.

That is why frankincense is in Lyla's Blend®. The science confirmed what reverence already understood.

Lyla's Blend® · Formulated like medicine. Felt like skin. 

 

SWEET ALMOND OIL

Prunus amygdalus dulcis

Before the prescription pad. Before the pharmacy shelf. There was a bottle from the corner shop, and your mother already knew.

PART ONE

For everyone

There is a particular kind of knowledge that does not come from research papers or clinical guidelines or dermatology conferences. It comes from mothers. From corner shops. From the completely unsentimental, entirely practical understanding,  passed down through generations of South Asian households long before the British emollient market existed,  that dry skin needed oil, here was some oil, and that was sufficient.

Sweet almond oil was that oil.

Not because anyone had run a randomised controlled trial. Not because a brand had positioned it beautifully or a celebrity had mentioned it. Because it worked. Because it had always worked. Because the women who used it on their children's skin, and whose mothers had used it on theirs, and whose grandmothers had used it on theirs, were participating in one of the longest-running observational studies in the history of skincare — and the results were consistently good.

I grew up with almond oil. It was on the shelf of the local Pakistani corner shop.   No fanfare, no marketing, just there, because of course it was there, because what else would you use. My mother used it on us. We used it on ourselves. Nobody called it a ritual. Nobody called it anything. It was simply what you did when your skin was dry, with the same unremarkable certainty that you put on a coat when it was cold.

Then came Sudocrem. Then Vaseline. Then oilatum and aveeno and cetraben and the entire architecture of the modern emollient market — products positioned as medical solutions to a problem that a bottle from a corner shop had been quietly solving for centuries. They all work, by the way. And Sudocrem — let the record show — has earned its place in the hall of fame. Anyone who grew up with acne before the modern treatments arrived knows exactly what I mean. Some loyalties are non-negotiable.

What makes almond oil worth choosing — above a white emollient cream, above a pharmaceutical moisturiser, above the medicated options — is that it brings something those products do not. It brings oleic and linoleic acid. It brings anti-inflammatory activity. It brings the kind of fatty acid profile that the skin barrier is actually built from, delivered in a form the skin recognises and uses rather than simply sits beneath.

It is not just occlusion. It is nutrition for the barrier itself.

And it has been doing this, without anyone's permission or approval, for over a thousand years.

The heritage -  briefly, because almond oil does not require elaboration

Ibn Sina - Avicenna prescribed it. In Al-Qanun fi'l-Tibb - The Canon of Medicine, 1025 CE, the most influential medical textbook of the medieval world.  He documented sweet almond oil for dry, depleted, and irritated skin. He was not discovering something new. He was recording something already known.

In Ayurveda it is roghan badam — the almond preparation — used for vata-imbalanced skin: dry, rough, depleted, lacking the moisture and smoothness that constitutes healthy skin in Ayurvedic assessment. It appears in classical Ayurvedic texts and remains in active use across South Asian households today — not as a wellness trend but as straightforward inherited practice.

In classical Persian and Arab medicine — the Unani tradition that synthesised Greek, Persian, and Indian medical knowledge — almond oil was a standard preparation for skin conditions, prescribed with the same matter-of-fact confidence that a GP today might recommend a moisturiser. Because it worked. Because the clinical observation was consistent. Because a thousand years of empirical evidence is not nothing.

None of this required a double-blind trial to be true. The trial came later. The knowledge came first.

PART TWO

For those of you who want to go further — the science in full

The fatty acid profile — what it contains and what that means

Sweet almond oil's therapeutic value at the skin barrier level is primarily delivered through its fatty acid composition:

Oleic acid (omega-9): Approximately 62–86% of sweet almond oil's fatty acid content. Oleic acid is a monounsaturated fatty acid that penetrates the stratum corneum — the outermost layer of the skin — with relative ease, delivering emollient activity within the lipid layers of the barrier itself rather than simply coating the surface. It has documented anti-inflammatory properties and supports the fluidity of the skin's lipid matrix, maintaining the barrier's ability to function as a selective membrane.

Linoleic acid (omega-6): Approximately 8–28%. Linoleic acid is an essential fatty acid — the skin cannot synthesise it and must obtain it exogenously. It is a critical structural component of ceramides — the lipid molecules that form the mortar between skin cells in the stratum corneum. Linoleic acid deficiency at the skin surface is directly associated with barrier dysfunction, increased transepidermal water loss, and the kind of dry, reactive, sensitised skin that presents chronically in clinical practice. Topical application of linoleic acid-rich oils has documented benefit in barrier repair and atopic skin conditions.

Palmitic acid: Approximately 4–9%. A saturated fatty acid that contributes to the emollient and occlusive properties of the oil — supporting the surface seal that reduces water loss.

Vitamin E (tocopherols): Naturally present in sweet almond oil at meaningful concentrations — contributing antioxidant activity and supporting the stability of the oil itself.

What this means at the barrier level

The skin barrier — properly called the stratum corneum — functions as a brick and mortar structure. Corneocytes (dead skin cells, the bricks) are embedded in a lipid matrix (the mortar) composed primarily of ceramides, cholesterol, and free fatty acids. When this matrix is intact, the barrier performs its two primary functions: keeping water in and keeping irritants and pathogens out.

When the barrier is compromised — by weather, age, stress, harsh cleansers, systemic inflammation, or simply insufficient fatty acid availability — transepidermal water loss increases, skin becomes dry and reactive, and the inflammatory cascade that drives conditions like eczema, rosacea, and sensitised skin becomes easier to trigger.

Sweet almond oil addresses this at two levels simultaneously. Its oleic acid content works within the existing lipid layers, maintaining fluidity and supporting the barrier's structural integrity. Its linoleic acid content provides the essential fatty acid substrate from which ceramides are synthesised — addressing the root cause of barrier deficiency rather than simply masking the symptoms of dryness.

This is the distinction between an oil that moisturises and an oil that repairs. Sweet almond oil does both.

The anti-inflammatory mechanism

Beyond its fatty acid profile, sweet almond oil demonstrates direct anti-inflammatory activity — relevant both for the skin surface and for the underlying inflammatory processes that drive barrier dysfunction.

Oleic acid has documented inhibitory effects on pro-inflammatory cytokine pathways. Studies have demonstrated reduction in inflammatory markers following topical application of oleic acid-rich oils in sensitised skin models. For the clinical presentation of dry, reactive, or chronically inflamed skin — the kind that presents repeatedly in GP practice, often inadequately managed by standard emollient prescriptions — this anti-inflammatory activity is a meaningful additional mechanism.

Clinical and published evidence

Hajhashemi, M., et al. (2018). The effect of Aloe vera gel and Sweet Almond oil on striae gravidarum in primiparous women. Journal of Maternal-Fetal & Neonatal Medicine, 31(13), 1703–1709. View Clinical Study on PubMed

Fiume, M. M., et al. (2019). Safety Assessment of Prunus amygdalus dulcis (Sweet Almond)-Derived Ingredients as Used in Cosmetics. International Journal of Toxicology, 38(1_suppl), 64S–83S. View Official Safety Review on PubMed

Lodén, M. (2003). Role of topical emollients and moisturizers in the treatment of dry skin barrier disorders. American Journal of Clinical Dermatology, 4(11), 771–788. View Study on PubMed

 Dattola, A., et al. (2020). Role of vitamins in skin health: A systematic review. Current Nutrition Reports, 9(3), 156–167. Read Free Full Text on PubMed Central

Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 1025 CE). Al-Qanun fi'l-Tibb (The Canon of Medicine). Foundational Unani text detailing botanical oils, emollient therapeutics, and topical pharmacology. View Digitized Manuscript at the Medical Historical Library

  Charaka Samhita (Circa 400 BCE–200 CE). Sutrasthana: Snehadhyaya (Treatise on Oleation & Lipids). Classical Ayurvedic text outlining Snehana (oil therapy) and botanical skin nourishers (Tvachya). View Digital Archive at WHO / AYUSH Repository

  Sushruta Samhita (Circa 600 BCE). Surgical & Dermatological Treatise. Classical Ayurvedic documentation of tissue regeneration, wound care, and lipid-based topical formulations. View Digitized Translation at Internet Archive

WHY IT'S IN LYLA'S BLEND®

Because it works. Because it has always worked. Because a bottle from a Pakistani corner shop in Bradford in the 1980s was doing exactly what a dermatologist would now recommend — delivering oleic and linoleic acid to a compromised skin barrier, reducing transepidermal water loss, providing anti-inflammatory fatty acids to reactive skin — with no clinical justification required beyond the completely reasonable observation that skin was dry and this helped.

I am a GP. I have written more emollient prescriptions than I can count;  oilatum, aveeno, cetraben, diprobase, all of them good, all of them doing the same fundamental thing by different routes. And I can tell you, with the authority of both my medical training and my childhood, that the women who used almond oil on their children's skin before any of those products existed were not doing something primitive or unscientific. They were doing something correct. The science simply hadn't written it up yet.

Sweet almond oil is in Lyla's Blend® because it earns its place twice- once in the evidence, and once in the memory of every South Asian household that already knew.

Before oilatum. Before aveeno. Before the prescription pad.

There was a bottle from the corner shop.

And your mother already knew.

Lyla's Blend® · Formulated like medicine. Felt like skin.

 

UNREFINED SHEA BUTTER

Vitellaria paradoxa

Shea was theirs. Almond was ours. And then curiosity took me somewhere my community hadn't been — and everything changed.

PART ONE

For everyone

There is an unspoken geography to the things communities know. Growing up Pakistani in Bradford in the 1980s, we had almond oil from the corner shop, mustard oil for hair, apricot kernel, henna, olive oil from the back of the kitchen cupboard. We had Avon. We had the Body Shop when it felt like a treat. These were ours — the things that came down through mothers and aunts and corner shops and just knowing.

Shea butter was not ours. Shea was for the Ghanaian women, the Nigerian women, the Afro-Caribbean women who had been using it the way we used almond oil - without ceremony, without explanation, with the quiet authority of inherited knowledge. It belonged to them the way almond belonged to us. Different soils. Different traditions. Both completely correct.

I didn't encounter shea until my MPhil years. Manchester, 2001 to 2004. A scholarship that didn't stretch to full time, so I worked at the Co-op selling mortgages and ISAs between lectures, helping my mum pay off some loans, swimming at Moss Side leisure centre in whatever time was left. Moss Side - if you know Manchester, you know exactly what that pool was, what that community was, the particular quality of that place. Bustling.

On the way back, wet hair that had always refused to behave - thick, curly, uncharacteristically so for a Pakistani woman, the kind of hair nobody in my family quite knew what to do with. We suspect it came from Arabic ancestry somewhere on my mother's side, a lineage that moved through Delhi and Malaysia then across to Pakistan and eventually to Bradford, expressing itself on my head in a way that sent me across community lines to find the knowledge that fit.

I started stopping at the Afro-Caribbean shops.

You know the ones. Wigs on stands outside in colours that stopped traffic. Hair extensions wall to wall and floor to ceiling, stacked so high you needed a step to reach the good stuff at the top. Lotions and potions in every direction - ingredients and brand names I'd never heard of, formulations developed by and for women whose hair and skin had been chronically underserved by mainstream beauty. The smell of it - warm, rich, coconut and shea and something specific to those shops that I can still locate in my body now if I close my eyes.

My hair had found its people. And so, it turned out, had I.

I took a quiet, private pride in being probably the only Pakistani woman regularly browsing those shelves. This was before Etsy. Before YouTube tutorials. Before the whole world discovered whipped shea butter and started calling it a revelation. I was there first, on the way back from Moss Side leisure centre, in my mid-twenties, reading every label with the same forensic attention I brought to my MPhil research.

I bought shea for my hair. I took it home. And then - deliberately, with full awareness of what I was doing - I put it on my skin.

It was delicious.

A note on honesty - because that is what this brand is for

Shea butter is extraordinary. It is also thick. Genuinely, substantially thick,  and at its full concentration it sits at the heavier end of the comedogenic scale, meaning it has the potential to block pores in skin that is already congested or acne-prone.

This is why in Lyla's Blend®, shea functions as a scaffold; present at a carefully considered concentration that provides its remarkable barrier-repair and anti-inflammatory benefits without dominating the formulation or overwhelming the skin. The lighter carriers;  jojoba, almond, avocado, do the absorbing. Shea provides the structure. The architecture beneath everything else.

One more thing worth knowing: Lyla's Blend® will melt in a hot car. I know this because I found out the hard way in the summer of 2020 - lockdown, a batch made for myself and the kids, left on the back seat on a warm Manchester day. Lesson learned. Keep it somewhere cool. It returns to its full consistency once it cools down, with no loss of efficacy but the back seat of a car in July is not its natural habitat.

For those with acne-prone or congested skin - a lower comedogenic formulation is currently in development. Watch this space.

How it began

2020. Lockdown. I made a batch for myself and the kids.

And then the family tried it... and then the friends... and then the work colleagues... and then they kept coming back.

That is how Lyla's Blend® began. Not with a business plan. Not with a brand strategy. With a whipped butter made in a kitchen in Manchester, for the people I loved, that turned out to work well enough that the people I loved kept asking for more.

The shea was always in it. From the very first batch.

The heritage

The Vitellaria paradoxa tree — the shea tree — grows across the semi-arid savannah belt of West and Central Africa, from Senegal in the west to Uganda in the east. It is known across the region as the karité tree — a French colonial name — and has been called, with complete accuracy, the tree of life.

The shea tree takes fifteen to twenty years to produce its first fruit. It lives for up to three hundred years. The nuts from which shea butter is extracted are harvested, processed, and prepared almost exclusively by women — a tradition of female knowledge and labour that stretches back centuries and represents one of the most significant examples of indigenous botanical expertise in the world.

Shea butter has been used across West Africa for wound healing, skin protection, relief from dry and cracked skin, maternal care, infant skin care, and protection against the harsh harmattan winds that strip moisture from skin with particular aggression. The explorer Mungo Park documented it in the late 18th century — noting both its production and its effects with evident admiration. He was not discovering something new. He was recording something ancient.

In ancient Egypt, shea butter was imported and used in cosmetic preparations — evidence of trade routes carrying it north from sub-Saharan Africa into the Mediterranean world centuries before the modern beauty industry existed.

PART TWO

For those of you who want to go further — the science in full

The fatty acid profile

Unrefined shea butter's therapeutic value is delivered through a remarkably complex composition:

Stearic acid: Approximately 35–45%. A saturated fatty acid that gives shea its semi-solid texture at room temperature and its occlusive properties at the skin surface. Stearic acid is a natural component of the skin's own lipid barrier — topical application replenishes what environmental stress, age, and barrier dysfunction deplete.

Oleic acid (omega-9): Approximately 40–55%. A monounsaturated fatty acid with documented penetration-enhancing and anti-inflammatory properties. Oleic acid works within the stratum corneum lipid layers — not just at the surface — supporting the fluidity and integrity of the barrier matrix.

Linoleic acid (omega-6): Approximately 3–8%. An essential fatty acid and precursor to ceramide synthesis — the structural mortar of the skin barrier. Even at lower concentrations, linoleic acid's contribution to barrier repair is clinically meaningful.

Palmitic acid: Approximately 3–7%. Contributes additional occlusive and emollient activity.

The unsaponifiable fraction — where shea becomes extraordinary

Most carrier oils contain an unsaponifiable fraction of less than 1%. Shea butter contains between 5–11% — an extraordinary concentration that distinguishes it from every other commonly used botanical fat. This fraction contains:

Triterpene alcohols — lupeol and ursolic acid: Documented anti-inflammatory activity through inhibition of pro-inflammatory enzyme pathways. Lupeol has demonstrated measurable inhibition of COX-2 — the same enzyme targeted by ibuprofen — at the skin level. Ursolic acid has documented collagen-stimulating and barrier-regenerating activity.

Cinnamic acid esters: Provide a degree of natural UV-filtering activity — not sufficient for sun protection claims, but contributing to the skin's environmental defence.

Phytosterols (beta-sitosterol, stigmasterol): Support collagen synthesis, reduce inflammation, and contribute to barrier restoration in compromised skin.

Tocopherols (Vitamin E): Natural antioxidant activity — protecting both the formulation and the skin from oxidative damage.

This unsaponifiable fraction is the reason unrefined shea outperforms refined in clinical application. The refining process — bleaching, deodorising, standardising — strips these bioactive compounds to produce a white, odourless, cosmetically elegant product. What you gain in aesthetics, you lose in efficacy. Lyla's Blend® uses unrefined shea specifically because the unsaponifiable fraction is not optional. It is the point.

On comedogenicity — the honest version

Shea butter rates at approximately 0–2 on the comedogenic scale (0 being non-comedogenic, 5 being highly likely to block pores) — which sounds reassuring until you account for concentration and individual skin type. At high concentrations, in skin that is already congested, shea can contribute to blocked pores. This is real. This is why concentration matters. And this is why Lyla's Blend® uses shea as a scaffold rather than a dominant carrier — present at a level that delivers its remarkable bioactive benefits without overwhelming a formulation designed to work across skin types.

For acne-prone skin specifically — a dedicated lower-comedogenic formulation is in development. Because the answer to "this ingredient doesn't suit everyone at full concentration" is not to abandon the ingredient. It is to formulate more precisely. Watch this space.

Clinical and published evidence

  Akihisa, T., et al. (2010). Anti-inflammatory and chemopreventive effects of triterpene cinnamates and acetates from shea fat. Journal of Oleo Science, 59(6), 273–280.

👉 View Study on PubMed

  Lin, T. K., et al. (2018). Anti-inflammatory and skin barrier repair effects of topical application of some plant oils. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 19(1), 70.

👉 Read Free Full Text on PubMed Central

  Hon, K. L., et al. (2005). Patient acceptability, efficacy and skin biophysics of a cream containing Vitellaria paradoxa (shea butter) in childhood atopic dermatitis. Hong Kong Medical Journal, 11(1), 61–63.

👉 View Clinical Study on PubMed

  Lodén, M. (2003). Role of topical emollients and moisturizers in the treatment of dry skin barrier disorders. American Journal of Clinical Dermatology, 4(11), 771–788.

👉 View Study on PubMed

For those who wish to explore the heritage literature:

  Park, M. (1799). Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa. W. Bulmer and Co. Historical documentation of the Shea tree (Vitellaria paradoxa) and traditional extraction.

👉 View Digitized Edition at Internet Archive

  Global Shea Alliance (GSA). Cultural Heritage, Sustainability & Livelihoods in the Shea Industry.

👉 View Documentation at Global Shea Alliance

WHY IT'S IN LYLA'S BLEND®

I came to shea the way I came to most of the things that matter — sideways, through curiosity, following something that didn't belong to my community's tradition and finding it recognised something in me anyway.

Moss Side leisure centre. Wet hair. An Afro-Caribbean shop with wigs in the window and shelves stacked higher than I could reach. 2001 or 2002, mid-twenties, MPhil scholarship, Co-op job, tight budget, enormous hair. I was there for my curls — the curls nobody in my Pakistani family could quite account for, that we suspect arrived via Arabic ancestry through Delhi and then Bradford, expressing themselves on my head with complete indifference to expectation.

I found shea. I found castor. I found the warm specific smell of those shops and the expertise of women who had been managing extraordinary hair and skin for generations before the mainstream beauty industry noticed either existed. This was before Etsy. Before YouTube. I took a quiet pride in that. I still do.

And then — deliberately, with full clinical awareness and complete inability to be entirely clinical about it — I put shea on my skin instead of my hair.

It was delicious. It was also, I later confirmed, doing something precise and documentable at the barrier level — delivering triterpenes, replenishing fatty acids, reducing inflammation I hadn't consciously registered. My skin knew before my training caught up.

Shea is in Lyla's Blend® as the structural foundation — the scaffold around which everything else is built. Present at the concentration that delivers its extraordinary bioactive profile without dominating or congesting. The heavier lifting is done. The lighter carriers do the absorbing. Shea holds it all together.

It started in a kitchen in Manchester in 2020. For myself and the kids. And then the family. And then the friends. And then the colleagues. And then they kept coming back.

The shea was always in it. From the very first batch.

Shea was theirs. And then, because curiosity is the best thing a person can have, it became mine too.

That is how the best things travel.

Lyla's Blend® · Medicine, applied to the skin

 

JOJOBA

Simmondsia chinensis

Some ingredients do not need a moment. They simply need to be understood.

PART ONE

For everyone

The beauty industry has a complicated relationship with loyalty. Every few years a new oil arrives — celebrated, hashtagged, positioned as the discovery that changes everything. Argan. Marula. Rosehip. Sea buckthorn. Each has its moment. Each is genuinely good. And then the moment passes, the next one arrives, and the cycle continues.

Jojoba watches all of this with complete indifference.

Not because it is better than everything that came after it — though the case can be made — but because it operates at a level that trends cannot touch. While every other botanical oil in your skincare is a triglyceride — a fat, doing fat things at the skin surface — jojoba is something structurally different. It is a liquid wax ester. The only one the plant kingdom produces. And that distinction, quiet as it sounds, changes everything about what happens when it meets your skin.

Your skin already makes wax esters. They are a significant component of your natural sebum — the oil your skin produces to protect and regulate itself. When you apply jojoba, you are not applying a foreign substance that the skin must accommodate. You are applying something it already recognises. Something it already speaks.

This is not marketing language. This is chemistry. And it is why jojoba, after decades of being quietly reliable while flashier oils took the spotlight, remains the one that serious formulators return to when the brief is to actually work rather than to trend.

A note on honesty — from a GP

The fundamental principle of skin hydration is straightforward: water, sealed in by fat, applied consistently, produces results. The fat does not need to be exotic. It does not need a certificate of origin or a celebrity endorsement. It needs to be compatible with your skin, applied over adequate hydration, and used regularly. Tallow works. Shea works. Jojoba works.

What makes jojoba worth choosing — above simple occlusion, above just sealing in moisture — is its structural compatibility with the skin's own chemistry. It is not just a fat doing fat things. It is a wax ester doing something closer to what your skin would do for itself, if it had the resources.

That is the difference. And it is a meaningful one.

The heritage

Jojoba is native to the Sonoran Desert — the extraordinary arid landscape spanning southern Arizona, California, and northwestern Mexico. In conditions that would defeat most plants — extreme heat, minimal water, rocky alkaline soil — the jojoba shrub not only survives but thrives, producing seeds so dense in liquid wax that they constitute approximately half the seed's weight.

The O'odham people — Indigenous inhabitants of the Sonoran Desert for thousands of years — understood what those seeds contained long before any chemist named it. They used jojoba for wound care, skin protection, and hair conditioning. They applied it to sores and damaged skin. They used it as a food source and traded it among communities across the desert. Their knowledge was empirical, accumulated across generations of careful observation — the same methodology, practised in a different landscape, that produced Ayurvedic medicine and TCM.

The botanical name — Simmondsia chinensis — contains a small historical embarrassment worth noting. When the botanist Johann Link classified the plant in 1822, he worked from a mislabelled specimen and concluded, incorrectly, that it originated in China. Hence chinensis. It has never grown in China. It has never been native to anywhere other than the Sonoran Desert. The name is a taxonomic error that has never been corrected — a reminder that the official record is not always the most accurate one, and that the O'odham people knew what this plant was and what it could do long before European science got anywhere near it.

PART TWO

For those of you who want to go further — the science in full

The wax ester — what it is and why it matters

To understand why jojoba is structurally unique, it helps to understand what every other plant oil actually is.

The vast majority of botanical oils — coconut, argan, rosehip, avocado, almond, and almost every other carrier oil used in skincare — are triglycerides. A triglyceride is a glycerol molecule with three fatty acid chains attached. When a triglyceride meets the skin surface, it behaves as a fat — it sits in the lipid layers, provides emolliency, reduces transepidermal water loss, and delivers its fatty acid content to the skin barrier. This is valuable. This is why carrier oils work. But it is a fundamentally different interaction from what jojoba does.

Jojoba is a wax ester — a molecule formed by the esterification of a fatty acid and a fatty alcohol. No glycerol backbone. No three-chain triglyceride structure. A single, long-chain molecule of extraordinary stability and a physical profile that closely mirrors one of the key components of human sebum.

Human sebum — the oil your skin produces naturally — is a complex mixture. Its composition includes triglycerides (approximately 41%), wax esters (approximately 26%), squalene (approximately 12%), free fatty acids (approximately 16%), and cholesterol esters and cholesterol making up the remainder. That 26% wax ester fraction is what jojoba structurally resembles. Not the whole of sebum — but a significant, functionally important component of it.

This structural resemblance has several documented consequences:

Skin recognition and integration: Because jojoba's wax ester structure is familiar to the skin's own chemistry, it integrates into the skin's lipid layers more readily than triglyceride oils. It does not simply coat the surface — it participates.

Sebum regulation: There is evidence that jojoba application may signal to the skin that sufficient sebum-like material is present, potentially moderating overproduction in oily or acne-prone skin. This is counterintuitive — applying an oil to reduce oiliness — but it is consistent with the principle that the skin responds to what it recognises. This mechanism is the subject of ongoing research.

Non-comedogenicity: Jojoba's wax ester structure means it does not behave like a conventional fat at the follicle level. It does not plug pores in the way that heavier triglyceride oils can in susceptible skin. This makes it appropriate across skin types — including those that react poorly to conventional carrier oils.

Permeability: Unlike fully occlusive agents such as petrolatum, jojoba creates a semi-permeable barrier — reducing transepidermal water loss while allowing some degree of gas exchange. This is more physiologically appropriate than complete occlusion, which prevents the skin from breathing and can disrupt its own regulatory processes over time.

Stability — why it matters for formulation

Wax esters are significantly more resistant to oxidative degradation than triglycerides. This means jojoba does not go rancid quickly. Its shelf life — without refrigeration, without added antioxidants — extends to several years under normal storage conditions. For a formulation containing multiple oils with varying stability profiles, jojoba provides a structurally stable base that protects the integrity of the blend over time.

In Lyla's Blend®, vitamin E (d-alpha-tocopherol) provides additional antioxidant stabilisation. The combination of jojoba's inherent wax ester stability and tocopherol's antioxidant activity means the formulation maintains its potency from first use to last.

Documented clinical and research evidence

• Meier L et al. Improvement of skin conditions in acne vulgaris: a pilot study using a clay jojoba oil facial mask. Forschende Komplementärmedizin. 2012. Demonstrated measurable improvement in acne lesion count and skin condition with regular jojoba mask application. PubMed
• Habashy RR et al. Anti-inflammatory effects of jojoba liquid wax in experimental models. Pharmacological Research. 2005. Documented anti-inflammatory activity of jojoba wax in vivo — relevant for reactive and sensitised skin. PubMed
• Ranzato E et al. Wound healing properties of jojoba liquid wax: an in vitro study. Journal of Ethnopharmacology. 2011. Demonstrated accelerated wound closure and fibroblast migration in jojoba-treated models — supporting its traditional use for skin repair. PubMed
• Pappas A. Epidermal surface lipids. Dermato-Endocrinology. 2009. Comprehensive review of sebum composition and the role of wax esters in skin surface lipid function — foundational referen   Meier, L., et al. (2012). Clay jojoba oil facial mask for lesioned skin and mild acne—results of a prospective, observational pilot study. Forschende Komplementärmedizin, 19(2), 75–79.View Clinical Study on PubMed
• Pappas, A. (2009). Epidermal surface lipids. Dermato-Endocrinology, 1(2), 72–76 Read Free Full Text on PubMed Central Ranzato, E., et al. (2011). Wound healing properties of jojoba liquid wax: An in vitro study. Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 134(2), 443–449. View Study on PubMed
• Habashy, R. R., et al. (2005). Anti-inflammatory effects of jojoba liquid wax in experimental models. Pharmacological Research, 51(2), 157–162 View Study on PubMed
• Evidence for understanding jojoba's structural relevance. PMC
• Zorica B et al. Jojoba oil: a functional ingredient in cosmetic formulation. Industrial Crops and Products. 2019. — Comprehensive review of jojoba's physical, chemical, and biological properties relevant to cosmetic formulation. ScienceDirect

For those who wish to explore the ethnobotanical record:

Gentry, H. S. (1958). The natural history of jojoba (Simmondsia chinensis) and its cultural aspects. Economic Botany, 12(3), 261–295. Foundational ethnobotanical account of Indigenous Sonoran Desert jojoba usage.

WHY IT'S IN LYLA'S BLEND®

I chose jojoba because it is the most skin-intelligent carrier oil available. Not the most fashionable — that changes annually. Not the most exotic — it grows in a desert and has done so for millennia without requiring anyone's attention. The most structurally compatible. The most stable. The most honest.

While the industry cycles through its favourites — and some of them are genuinely excellent, and some of them smell significantly better than jojoba in its raw state, which I will simply leave there — jojoba continues to be the one that serious formulators reach for when the formulation has to actually perform. Not occasionally. Not impressively in a before-and-after photograph taken in good lighting. Consistently, reliably, across skin types and conditions and climates and ages.

As a GP my interest in skincare has always been functional before it is aesthetic. Does it work? By what mechanism? For whom and under what conditions? Jojoba answers all three questions cleanly. It works because of what it is — a wax ester that speaks the skin's own language. It works for almost everyone because its non-comedogenic, semi-permeable profile avoids the pitfalls that make other carrier oils problematic for reactive skin. And it works consistently because its stability means it does not degrade between your first and last use.

The trend will always move on. Jojoba will still be here.

It always has been.

Lyla's Blend® · Medicine, applied to the skin.

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