The Greeks called it sideritis, from sideros, iron. Look at where it chooses to grow and you understand why. It comes out of bare rock on the slopes of Olympus, splitting the stone to reach the light, the way only iron splits stone. A plant with that much force in it was never going to be gentle in what it makes. And the ancients used it as iron's answer as well as its equal: it was the herb they laid on wounds made by iron weapons.

When we ran our analysis, mountain tea was the only plant on the panel carrying compounds we found in nothing else. Two of them the reference library could not even name.

Two thousand years later, we still do not know everything that is inside it.

And where these plants grow matters, because it decides how much they make. Our herbs grow where the summers are dry, the sun is hard and the temperature drops at night. A plant under that kind of pressure has to make more of what protects it, and those are the same compounds your skin can use. The mountain tea that splits rock to reach the light is not a gentle plant, and that is exactly why we want it.

Some of our herbs we grow ourselves. Others we pick by hand in the Olympus area, each one in its own short window in the year, when it is at its strongest.

A small number of botanicals simply do not grow in a Greek climate. For those we work with the same trusted growers we have used for years, chosen the same way we choose everything else: by what the analysis shows is inside them.

What we never do is buy a ready-made extract from a catalogue and put our name on it. Everything in a DOS formula starts as a plant.

We build four herbal Elixirs, one for each kind of formula we make, and the products are built on those.

We combined these exceptional Greek herbs and created Elixir No.1, and with it we enhanced the antioxidant action of our day creams. Elixir No.2 was built for the demands of the eye area. Elixir No.3 goes into the night creams. Elixir No.4 protects the skin's natural pH in our cleansers.

Each Elixir is named for the herbs doing the most work in it. There are more inside. Elixir No.3, the one in our night creams, holds eleven.

Most brands take their supplier's word for what is inside an extract. We do not, and this analysis was not bought from an agency either. I ran it myself, as part of my postgraduate research, at a research institute in northern Italy that specialises in the analysis of medicinal plants. I carried our own herbs there from our own lab, and I was in the room when the results came through.

We screened our herbs against a reference panel of 186 known phenolic acids and flavonoids. Ninety-nine of them were there.

Then we ran the blend. The richest single herb held 57 of those compounds. The herbs together held 72, more than any herb going into it, and three compounds appeared in the blend that we could not find in any herb on its own.

One thing we want to be clear about. This panel looks for one family of compounds. It is not the whole of a plant, and we would not claim it is. Some of our herbs are in a formula for what this panel does not measure: the beta glucans in barley, the tannins in knotgrass, what fermentation releases from kale. We measured what we could measure, and we are telling you exactly what that was.

Ancient Greek herbalism worked with whole plants. Theophrastus catalogued them, Dioscorides wrote down what each one did, and none of them ever isolated a single molecule, because none of them could. The modern industry does the opposite. It pulls out one compound, standardises it, and throws the plant away.

We did not arrive at the whole plant as a philosophy. We arrived at it because our blend measured richer than any herb inside it, and because three compounds turned up in that blend that were in none of the herbs alone. The ancients used the whole plant because they had no choice. We use the whole plant because we measured it.

It is also why our ingredient lists are long, and why we publish every one of them in full. Each herb in a formula brings its own set of actives with it.

They are both, deliberately.

Hyaluronic acid holds water where the skin can use it. Marine collagen and elastin work together, which is rarer than it sounds, because most brands use collagen alone and leave out the protein that lets skin spring back. Palmitoyl tetrapeptide-7 signals repair rather than forcing it.

Niacinamide, vitamin C, kojic acid and licorice give us four separate routes to an even tone. Pigmentation almost never answers to one, which is why a single brightening active so often disappoints.

Everything on this page exists for one reason. Richer raw material, whole plants instead of single molecules, and actives rebuilt so that they get past the surface. Our customers tell us, again and again, that they see a difference within seven to ten days. We are comfortable putting that in writing, and we are not nervous about you holding us to it.

There is one condition. It has to be the right formula for your skin. A product built for dehydration will do very little for pigmentation, however good it is, and that is exactly where most skincare goes wrong.

So the question we have to answer before we recommend anything is not what is wrong with your skin. It is how your skin behaves.

That is a different way of looking at things. It reads the whole picture rather than the one thing going wrong this week, it follows the way your skin leans as the season changes, and it works towards balance instead of towards a quick fix. It is why our questions are about behaviour and not about labels, and it is the reason two people who arrive with the same concern do not leave with the same protocol.