Roll-on Skin Relief can be used as often as needed to reduce itching and pain. The way to get best results over time goes like this:

1. Apply to moist skin immediately AFTER toweling when you have showered or taken a bath.
2. Allow a few minutes for the oils to be absorbed and set before putting on clothes.
3. Daily use will help your skin heal over weeks, and then reduce the frequency and severity of flares.

You can carry Skin Relief with you in purse or pocket for use whenever you need it. Most users do the after-shower and a later application for the first week or two until their skin settles down, then the daily after-shower keeps your skin barrier happy.

Most people get a month to six weeks from a single bottle - because there is no water or other stuff like that, the product is 100% hero ingredients. If your big bottle of Aveeno lasts two months, this product will last about that long too!

There are a lot of reasons to avoid synthetic perfumes and "natural" scents and flavors. Those ingredients are used to create a scent, or to mask a scent, and many of them are irritants or sensitizers. An example is limonene which is used commonly to give products a clean citrus aroma - it also sensitizes your skin and can even be activated by sunlight.

Our essential oils are used for functional reasons, not for scent! If you go to the ingredients page you can learn more, but an example is our oregano oil that we include because it is very powerfully anti-mictrobial; in tests it is only of the only things that is safe for your skin and capable of killing antibiotic resistant bacteria.

So the aroma of Skin Relief products is entirely the functional botanicals that help manage infections and restore a normal skin microbiome and barrier function.

We use carefully selected essential oils that have shown in laboratory and clinical studies to provide big benefits for skin health. Our blends are adjusted to contain the amounts and types of such oil with well documented results.

Our Skin Relief products contain 8% to 11% essential oils in ratios that our tests have shown are most helpful.

Our Ingredients page has information on every ingredient we use, with references cited for you to explore, and Wikipedia links as well.

Our motto is, after all: Nothing wicked, nothing weird.

Most skin products are either ointments with a petroleum jelly base or lotions which are water based. Water based products are either emulsions (which need surfactants of some sort) or mixtures - all of which also have thickeners, preservatives, stabilizers, and often artificial scents.

We have a detailed blog post with references on this topic. Here are the top level problems with lotions:

• Water HURTS when you first apply lotion on problem skin.
• The alcohols and preservatives are to one degree or another inflammatory and often sensitizing.
• Some moisturizer and lotion compounds may be carcinogenic sometimes depending on your skin and the other ingredients.
• Problems with lotions are very under-reported, so dermatologists keep recommending them even though for many of us they make things worse over time.

Our Skin Relief products do not have any of those things in them. Just plant oils in a custom blend for relief and long term healing.

This is such a great question. So many brands have moved their manufacturing to China, or India, or some other place far away.

We make our products in the USA. Early batches for testing are made in-house in our laboratory. When we scale a product up it is made by one of a few carefully selected USA companies that have good quality controls and FDA registration.

We have three layers of quality control: Ingredient selection of vendors and analysis before use, in-process quality controls on the methods and purity and cleanlliness of manufacturing, then final acceptance testing of physical, chemical, and biological properties.

The reason we love castor oil is that is a uniquely magical natural oil. Castor oil is the only source of ricinoleic acid, which has been proven to promote skin healing and reduce inflammation. Ricinoleic acid also helps modulate some EP3 prostaglandin functions that effect intercellular and intracellular process. See our ingredients page for a couple of scientific references.

Takeaway: Castor oil has been used for many thousands of years in traditional African medicine, and it turns out that those healers were onto something great.

Your microbiome is the collection of all the various bacteria, funghi, and viruses that normally keep you in good health by digesting your food and protecting your skin from infections. People with eczema, psoriasis, arthritis, asthma, IBD, and other inflammatory disorders almost always have strange microbiomes - which causes which? We don't know.

When your skin microbiome is messed up, you get low grade infections of bacteria and/or funghi and that causes local inflammation, itching, skin failures, weeping, bumps and weird textures, and so on. Gut microbiome problems are important causes of skin issues as well. Take care of your bacteria! You need the right ones in the right places.

What can mess up your microbiome? Now we expand our scope and take a 360 degree look around your life at all the influences and exposures that change your health. Check out our explainer in two parts: What is my exposome, and How can I improve it?