Verdant Botanicals · Kotagiri, the Nilgiris · since 2019
Thirteen ingredients. Every one of them printed on the carton with its percentage, its Latin name and the district it grew in. Six are drawn on this page, at the part we actually use.
The bar below is the label, to scale. Twenty-six per cent of the serum is moringa seed oil pressed in Dharmapuri; fifteen-hundredths of a per cent is saffron stigma from Pampore, which works out at about seven flowers a bottle. Every figure is by weight and they add to one hundred, because they have to.
These are those six, drawn at the part we buy — seed, whole herb, leaf, root, heartwood, stigma. The remaining seven are jojoba, squalane, sunflower, rosemary, tocopherol, bisabolol and the gingelly oil that makes up a fifth of the bottle. Two of those are made in a factory and the label says which.
Four drops, morning and night, pressed onto damp skin. There is no water in the bottle, which is why there is no preservative in it either. It smells of vetiver first, then sandalwood, then — faintly, if you go looking — neem.
The glass is worth keeping, so we sell the refill without any: a flat 30 ml pouch, ₹620 less, which is most of what the bottle and the dropper cost us.
Verdant is Meenakshi Rajagopal, who trained as a food technologist in Thanjavur, and four people in two rooms above Kannerimukku Road. Nothing is contract-manufactured, so the calendar below is the whole of it — one batch, drawn to scale in days.
Two of the durations we are proudest of are thinner than the rule they sit on: eight hours for the vetiver in the copper still, and the forty hours a moringa kernel is allowed between shelling and pressing. Days 92 to 140 are a gap because nothing happens in them — the oil sits.
Moringa, gingelly, vallarai and neem. Certificate IN-ORG-005/VB/2026, issued by Indocert, valid to 31 March 2027. We will send you the PDF if you ask.
Squalane, jojoba, tocopherol and bisabolol are made in factories. Sandalwood and saffron come through licensed government channels. Rosemary and sunflower are conventionally farmed. We are not going to write “natural” over that.
We have not applied for any of them. No animal testing, here or by anyone we buy from. And we do not call this a kumkumadi tailam — that is a specific classical formula, and this is not it.
Keyed to the plate numbers. Everything but the saffron is within 340 km of the workshop, which is less a principle than a consequence of buying from people we can drive to.
Or from us: two to four days anywhere in India, free above ₹1,500. We do not ship outside India yet.