Six plants, six places, and what each one is doing in the bottle.

Murungai · Drumstick tree

Part used

Seed, cold-pressed at 38 °C

Grown at

Pennagaram, Dharmapuri · 480 m

Harvest

February to April

Bought from

Sengodan family, 4.2 acres, NPOP certified since 2021

It is the road the rest of the formula travels on. Pods are stripped by hand and the kernels pressed within forty hours of shelling, cold, so the oil stays pale and never goes waxy. On skin it is gone in about forty seconds. That is the entire reason it is a quarter of the bottle.

The trees are never cut back for the pods. A 26-year-old moringa is worth more standing.

Vallarai · Indian pennywort

Part used

Whole herb above the root, shade-dried nine days

Grown at

Selur nadu, Kolli Hills, Namakkal · 1,050 m

Harvest

November to January, a fortnight after the rain stops

Bought from

Twelve growers, through the Kolli Hills growers' collective

Cut by hand while the leaf is still soft, then dried in shade for nine days — never sun, which turns the infusion the colour of tea. We steep it in the gingelly oil for six weeks in glass rather than pulling it out with a solvent. It is why the serum smells faintly of wet grass.

Kolli Hills vallarai has a smaller, thicker leaf than the plains kind. We pay about 40% more for it.

Vembu · Neem

Part used

Leaf, first flush

Grown at

Kalayarkoil, Sivagangai · 90 m

Harvest

March to May, in the first week after the flush

Bought from

Seventy-one bund and roadside trees, mapped and paid per kilo

Picked while the leaflets are still pale and soft, and used within four days. Two per cent is a ceiling we set ourselves: above that, neem is the only thing anyone can smell, and the serum stops being a serum and starts being a remedy.

We do not buy neem leaf powder. It is almost always last year's leaf.

Vettiver · Khus

Part used

Root, copper-distilled over eight hours

Grown at

Bhavani, Erode · 180 m

Harvest

January, before the river rises

Bought from

Four families who have distilled on the Bhavani bank for three generations

Roots are lifted at eighteen months, washed in river sand and distilled in copper. Younger roots give more oil and less smell, so we pay for the older ones. This is the cool, damp note that sits under everything and keeps the blend from turning sweet.

Eighteen months in the ground for 0.9% of a bottle. It is the slowest thing we buy.

Chandanam · Indian sandalwood

Part used

Heartwood, steam-distilled

Grown at

Marayoor, Idukki, Kerala · 1,020 m

Harvest

Bought at the January depot auction

Bought from

Kerala Forest Development Corporation depot, Marayoor · transit permit KFD/MRY/2026/0884

Sandalwood is a controlled species, so we say exactly where ours comes from and keep the permit number on the batch record. Six-tenths of a per cent is all a 30 ml bottle needs — it holds the vetiver in place for four or five hours instead of twenty minutes.

We have never bought sandalwood from a private seller and do not intend to.

Kungumapoo · Saffron

Part used

Stigma, hand-picked at dawn

Grown at

Pampore, Pulwama, Kashmir · 1,585 m

Harvest

Late October, in the four hours after sunrise

Bought from

Eleven growers, direct, through the Pampore trade society

About a hundred and fifty flowers make one gram of dried stigma. There are forty-five milligrams in a bottle — roughly seven flowers. Saffron is the colour of this serum and a small part of its smell. It is not doing anything else, and we are not going to tell you it is.

Kashmir, not Tamil Nadu. The only thing in the bottle we buy from outside the south.