About Halo
A short range, made slowly, on purpose.
Halo started in a Glasgow flat in 2019, after one of us spent four years and about £900 trying to work out which of forty products was causing a rash that covered both cheeks. It turned out to be a fragrance compound in a moisturiser sold as "gentle".
So we did the obvious thing and made seven formulas instead of forty. Each one has a job, a full ingredient list with percentages, and no explanation that requires a chemistry degree to read.
The awkward part
"Fragrance-free" means less than you think.
It is not a regulated phrase. Nothing stops a brand printing it on a bottle that smells of lavender.
What the law actually requires
On a UK or EU label, the word Parfum is a legal catch-all. It can stand for a single molecule or for a mixture of fifty, and a formulator is not obliged to say which. The twenty-six fragrance allergens that are known to cause contact allergy only have to be named when they pass 0.001% in a leave-on product or 0.01% in a rinse-off one. Below that line they vanish into "Parfum".
There is also no legal definition of "fragrance-free" in UK cosmetics law. A product can carry the phrase and still contain an essential oil, a botanical extract added for its smell, or a masking fragrance included to cover the smell of the raw materials.
What we do instead
- No Parfum, no essential oils, no "natural aroma", no masking fragrance — in any product, at any percentage.
- Every ingredient published with the percentage we use, on the product page, not just on the carton in 5pt type.
- Where we add something only because customers expect it, we say so. Glycerin is in there partly because a moisturiser that does not feel wet is a moisturiser people stop using.
- If a raw material arrives with a smell of its own, we do not cover it. The Daily Barrier Moisturiser smells faintly of nothing, which is what an unscented cream smells like.
Who makes it
One formulator, one lab, one filling bench.
Our formulas are written by a cosmetic chemist who spent fourteen years in over-the-counter dermatology before going independent. She works from a small GMP-certified lab in the central belt, and we are the only brand she formulates for that sells direct to the public.
Everything is filled, labelled and packed by hand in Glasgow in batches of four hundred. Batch number, fill date and expiry are printed on the base of every bottle, and stability data for each batch is kept for the life of the product.
We test on paid human volunteers with a history of reacting to cosmetics — forty of them for the current range, patch-tested over four weeks. No animal testing, at any stage, by us or by any supplier we use.
What we deliberately do not do
- We do not launch a new product every season. The last one took nineteen months.
- We do not use the words "clean", "pure", "detox" or "chemical-free". Water is a chemical.
- We do not put a serum, an essence and a mist in the routine. Three steps is the whole method.
- We do not pay for reviews, and we do not delete the bad ones.
- We do not add actives that need a warning leaflet — no retinol, no strong acids, no benzoyl peroxide.
- We do not sell through marketplaces where the stock could sit in a hot warehouse for a year.
Questions
If you have a specific ingredient you avoid, ask us.
Tell us the ingredient and we will tell you whether it is in the range, at what percentage, and what we would use instead if it is.