Cocoa as pigment.
How food-grade cocoa lets us hit five shade-matched tints with one ingredient instead of a synthetic-pigment cocktail.
Five tints, one ingredient. The slider on the product page steps from Linen to Walnut — five batches with different cocoa percentages. The shade comes from the cocoa, full stop. There is no synthetic dye, no iron oxide, no titanium dioxide hiding in the formula to give it colour.
This is unusual. Most tinted skincare products use a combination of synthetic pigments — usually iron oxides plus titanium dioxide for opacity — and the formula has to be engineered to suspend those pigments evenly through the product. You end up with two extra ingredient categories on the label: the pigments themselves, and the surfactants and dispersants needed to keep them in suspension. The label gets longer. The chemistry gets more complicated.
We didn't want that. We wanted a balm short enough that everyone reading the ingredient list could pronounce every item. Four ingredients was the design constraint. So cocoa had to do the colour work.
It does, but only because of how we batch. Sunnbalm is made in five separate batches per release — one batch per shade. The cocoa percentage steps up across the five batches in a measured progression: Linen (under one percent cocoa) through Walnut (up to twenty percent cocoa). The cocoa is folded into the tallow-beeswax matrix while it's still warm, then cooled into the tin. Once cooled, the cocoa is suspended in the lipid structure of the balm without separating.
Cocoa has a few useful properties beyond colour. It's naturally polyphenol-rich — cocoa flavanols are well-studied for their antioxidant activity in both oral and topical research literature. We don't use cocoa for that reason, but it's in there, and it doesn't hurt. It also lends a very faint, warm cocoa scent to the balm. We don't add any other fragrance — the cocoa smell is the only scent in Sunnbalm.
The cocoa we use is unsweetened, alkalised (Dutch-processed), and food-grade. We source from West African and Latin American producers, audited fair-trade where the supplier offers that certification.
The shade slider isn't a gimmick. It's how we kept the formula short.