What do you mean, ‘no-nonsense’ grooming?

You’ll occasionally see the words ‘no-nonsense’ on my packaging, leaflets, listings, and this website, and you might wonder what’s meant by it. OK, you probably won’t, but allow me to expand upon it anyway (after all, we’re both here, and I’ve got five minutes to kill).

In recent years I've become cautious about the skin and hair care products I use. I’ve had mild eczema all my life, and lately, rosacea has joined the party too.

I’d been buying grooming products for years before it occurred to me to look at the ingredients on the labels. When I did, I was none the wiser. I had no idea what any of the long, complex scientific names were, and therefore had no idea how they were benefitting me or my skin. I also couldn’t understand why there was a need for as many as fifty ingredients in a tiny bottle.

Could all of those ingredients really be necessary (or even active), when I was only smearing a pea-sized amount onto my skin? I couldn’t help wondering whether a simpler solution might actually be more effective. I looked into it.

One of the very early pieces of research I discovered stopped me in my tracks: “Up to 60% of topicals (products that we spread on our skin, such as moisturisers and sun creams), get absorbed into our blood stream”.

When you stop to think about it, that makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? After all, where else would all that product go?

With more research, I discovered just how potent and effective ingredients that are sustainably sourced from nature can be, and it made me wonder why many chemicals are in grooming products at all?

This made me think even more carefully about my skin care. Nothing made my skin feel the way I wanted, so I read a multitude of books and scoured the internet for alternative solutions using natural ingredients. The initial results were great and kept getting better.

I loved being a wizard; concocting elixirs and carefully balancing plant extracts, oils botanicals and butters to make potent and effective skin care that was 100% natural.

I gave these concoctions to friends and used their feedback, suggestions and encouragement to help refine formulas further. Eventually, I made small batches of products in limited quantities and sold them on Amazon, where again, the feedback was hugely positive.

I do not use chemicals, SLS, parabens, sulfates, or synthetic and alcohol-based ingredients (which can dry the skin out) in my products. I don’t even use artificial colouring. The colour of my products, is determined solely by the natural ingredients in them.

I’m serious about being ‘no-nonsense’: If you try Gnarly Joe® products and they merely help to make your skin, moustache, beard and hair look visibly better, then I’ve failed. I want my products to make you feel better and be healthy. Those are the parameters I use when developing products, and that’s why they’re no-nonsense.