Why We Reduced the Argan in Our Coffee Exfoliant

The short answer: argan oil is a genuinely good ingredient — on skin that keeps it. A scrub is on your skin for a couple of minutes and then rinses down the drain, and in that window argan has no real job to do. So we reduced it to half of what it was and let the ingredients that do work in two minutes — the tallow, the coffee, the colloidal oatmeal — carry the formula. Nothing about how the scrub feels or works got worse. We just stopped paying for a passenger.

The question I ask every ingredient

Not "is this good?" but "is this good here?" Argan is excellent in a leave-on product where it has hours to condition skin. In a rinse-off, the honest answer is that most of it goes down the drain before it does anything. Formulating well means being willing to admit that — and it's the same principle that led us to take the tallow out of our deodorant: the best ingredient is the one that fits the job.

What still does the work

The Coffee Exfoliant is built on our own in-house-rendered bison tallow, coffee-infused jojoba, mango and shea butters, colloidal oatmeal, and finely ground single-farm Guatemalan coffee — with cardamom and copaiba for the scent. The tallow is why it moisturizes while it exfoliates instead of stripping you; the coffee is the exfoliation; the oatmeal keeps it gentle. A little argan remains for slip. That's the honest recipe, and the honest reason.

If you've never used it: here's what a coffee scrub actually does.