It started with my own shelf.
I'm Lee, a musician and the founder of ORB. This started as a personal reckoning. I began pulling labels apart. I read about toxicology and endocrine disruptors. I learned that "fragrance" is a legal black box for hundreds of synthetic compounds. The deeper I looked, the less I could keep using what I had been using.
So I started cleansing. Beauty products first. Then cleaning supplies. Then candles, laundry, anything that touched my body daily. I detoxed my home and rebuilt what I put on my skin from the ground up.
There was also the cost. Not just financial, though that was real. A serum for this, an eye cream for that, a treatment for something else. Each product promising something specific, none of them quite delivering. The routine itself had become the problem: too many steps, too many ingredients I couldn't vouch for, obscene amounts of money spent on things that kept multiplying. I wanted one thing I believed in completely.
The hardest part wasn't cutting things. It was finding a replacement that actually worked: something that felt refined, smelled sophisticated, and didn't ask me to give up the rituals I love. So I started making my own. Slow-rendered tallow at my kitchen counter in Pasadena. A short list of botanicals. Months of testing on my own face before I'd give a jar to anyone.
What I found was that tallow is one of the most skin-compatible lipids in nature, rich in the same fats my skin already makes. Lamb is the one that feels made for the face: lighter, silkier, quicker to melt in. One step, and a short list of ingredients I can vouch for completely.
Tamar, my friend and fellow mom, a filmmaker, was the first person I shared a jar with. She came back asking for more. So we made more.
ORB is what we couldn't find anywhere else: something that works, that you can trust, and that finally simplifies the whole thing.