Ritual Organics

Long caption today - skip it if you already read your labels.

“Fragrance” on an ingredient list is one word standing in for an entire formula. It’s protected as a trade secret, and a single one can be built from dozens of separate chemicals. You don’t get to know which.

Here’s some of what has turned up in there:

Diethyl phthalate, added to make a scent last longer on skin. When the CDC ran its national biomonitoring survey it found DEP breakdown products in all 2,540 people it tested. Phthalates as a class are studied for interfering with hormone signaling, and the strongest evidence sits with the ones Europe already pulled from cosmetics: DEHP, DBP, BBP.

Lilial, which smells like lily of the valley and lived in soaps and detergents and perfumes for decades. The EU banned it outright in March 2022 after classifying it as toxic for reproduction. Still legal here.

Musk xylene, a synthetic musk, flagged by Europe as a substance of very high concern.

I can’t tell you those are in the bottle on your counter. Nobody can. That’s the problem.

What gets me is the gap. Europe has banned or restricted well over a thousand ingredients from cosmetics. The FDA’s list is about a dozen. Congress passed a law in 2022 telling the FDA to require fragrance allergen disclosure, and the deadline to even propose that rule was June 2024. Still nothing.

So we buy like the rule already exists. If we can’t find out what a scent is, it doesn’t come in the house. That goes for laundry soap, cleaning spray, and the candles we don’t own.
Our balm is 0.3% organic lavender oil. That’s literally all you can smell in there.

Go read the back of whatever you put on your skin every day. If it says fragrance, it’s worth doing a bit more research before buying.

Just look up Ritual Organics in Tik Tok shop to find our sale on there!

1.5 years in, it’s good to back the camera up a bit and see how far we’ve come. Grateful for all the love s d support we’ve received along the way!

When is a brand collab more than a brand collab?

We teamed up with the incredible and to create something really special.

One of the best parts of building a brand is doing it with people you love. To celebrate our friendship and the release of ‘s new poetry book Letters From the Shore, we brought our brands and creativity together to make something truly special. 

We started this little brand .co from the North Shore of Oahu, and serendipitously, much of Katie’s inspiration for the poems in her new book were birthed in the midst of the North Shore’s outrageous beauty. 

We want our brand to represent more than just the products we share with people. We want it to reflect our love for people and our friends. This shirt and its design (mostly Katie’s genius) is a poignant example of that. 

It’s printed on organic cotton shirts (obviously) with a delightfully boxy/ modern streetwear fit. 

The poem on the back says “day after day, the faithful seeds sown” 
in the hope-soiled ground of what could be” 

To me (Jon), it evokes the slow, un-flashy journey (ritual) of investing in the things that last. Family, great friendships, our work as creatives, and business. 

We’re splitting the profit evenly between brands (Ritual Organics and A Space to Sow), so every order funds Jon, Gabs, Jake and Katie’s life, adventures, and time with friends. 

We hope you wear these proudly and remember that great things come from humble beginnings.

Hi 🌞