Made by hand, by someone who needed it to work
Caberston is a one-woman workshop in a Tweed Valley mill town. Seven products, blended in small batches, from oils you could eat.
Lisa spent most of her adult life with skin that reacted to things. Not dramatically — just enough to make every new product a gamble. Tight after cleansing. Red along the jaw by the afternoon. The word on the front of the bottle was almost always gentle.
Eventually she stopped reading the front of the bottle and started reading the back. What she found was that the expensive cream she had been rationing was mostly water, thickened with a synthetic emulsifier and perfumed to smell like something it was not. The active ingredient she was paying for was somewhere near the bottom of the list, below the preservative.
She started making her own. Badly at first, then less badly, then properly — cold-pressed oils sourced by the litre, blended in a domestic kitchen in the Borders, tested on the most sensitive skin she had access to, which was her own.
Caberston is what that turned into. It is still made the same way: by hand, in batches small enough that Lisa knows which press each oil came from. There is no water in any of it, no synthetic fragrance, and no preservative — because a formulation made in small enough quantities does not need one.
If I would not put it on my own skin, it does not go in the jar. Lisa, founder
Placeholder artwork. Place — 3:4. The Tweed Valley, or the workshop window. Landscape or interior, muted and cool, in contrast to the warm product shots.A mill town in the Tweed Valley
Walkerburn was built around a woollen mill in 1854 and spent a century making cloth that went all over the world. The mill is gone. The habit of making things properly, in a small place, by people who put their name to it, is not.
Every Caberston order is blended, filled, labelled and packed here, then walked to the post office. There is no warehouse and no third party in between.
Three rules we formulate by
Nothing that is only there for texture
No fillers, no thickeners, no synthetic emulsifiers. If an ingredient is in the bottle, it is there because it does something for your skin.
Small enough not to need preservative
Water is what makes skincare spoil. Anhydrous oil formulations, made in small batches and used within months, stay stable without a preservative system.
Packaging that outlives nothing
Frosted glass, bamboo, aluminium, paper. Every part of a Caberston parcel can be refilled, recycled or composted.
Seven products, and that is deliberate
Enough to build a full routine. Not so much that you have to guess where to start.
