The Apothecary is the place. Librarian is the job. An apothecary is a person before it is a building — the one who knows what is actually in things, and can tell saffron from turmeric dyed to pass for it. This one keeps a materia medica: every ingredient, what it does, and what the evidence actually says.
I do not tell you what to buy. I find the source, read it, and hand it to you — that is the librarian's half. When you would rather someone else did the reading, that is what a Peek is for.
I've been a makeup artist since 1991 and a licensed aesthetician since 2005. In 2013 I founded my own skincare and fragrance line, version.O. I've built ingredient glossaries for beauty and wellness brands, including an essential oil line of around two hundred single oils. I've rewritten entire brands' labels to be INCI compliant, and written the copy on the front of the bottle. So I know exactly how the claims get made — and who's making them.
Shelf — send me your shelf, and I'll tell you what to keep, toss, and swap.
The Ingredient Librarian — a growing database of over seventy-five hundred ingredients and nine hundred products.
And a Substack newsletter that demystifies clean beauty, one myth and one misunderstanding at a time.
I tell you upfront. The library runs on facts and only what logically follows from them. I take no brand deals — nobody pays for a spot on a list or for a verdict. I earn a small affiliate commission when you buy through my links, and I disclose it every time.
And I sell a house line: version.O is mine. You should know that, and you should hold it against me if the library ever flatters it unfairly. It's judged by the exact same rules as everything else, and it gets no place it hasn't earned.