Alpine rose is the shrub that turns the slopes above our valley pink in early summer. Ours grows at 1,200 m on a neighbor’s slope just above the lab, where the family has kept a stand of it for decades. That’s low for a plant that prefers acidic soil and a long winter under snow, so the shrubs grow slowly, and we never take much from any one of them.

The pink flowers aren’t what goes into the bottle. We use the leaves, whose rust-colored undersides give the plant its Latin name, ferrugineum. Jonas, our grower, cuts them by hand after flowering and dries them in the loft of our barn before they’re extracted at the lab.

Alpine rose goes into the Alpine Rose Serum at 2%, alongside niacinamide at 4%, to help calm the look of redness and support a more even-looking tone. In the Pine & Rose Body Oil it sits at 1%, beside stone pine.

One honest detail: the percentage on the label is the extract as we add it to the batch, carrier included. It isn’t 2% dried leaf, and we’d rather you knew.