It started at our kitchen table.

Ten years ago we were not trying to start a business. We were trying to find one bar of soap that would not leave someone we love red, cracked, and itching by morning.

Five handmade Tayo’s Skincare bars laid in a diagonal row on a white studio table

The labels told us why.

The bars on the drugstore shelf promised gentleness. The ingredient lists said otherwise.

We read them. Detergents, synthetic fragrance, and preservatives we could not pronounce, and the one thing real soap is supposed to keep, the glycerin that holds moisture in skin, stripped out and sold back to us in a separate bottle. No one making those bars had ever met the person we were buying them for.

So we started making our own, at home, the slow way: oils and butters we could name, cured for weeks, with the glycerin left exactly where it belongs. The first batches were for one person. They worked.

“Every recipe we have was made for someone first. A sister with eczema. A friend fighting dark spots. A mother whose skin had changed. We did not formulate for a market. We formulated for people at our table.”

Then the friends started asking.

A bar would go home with a cousin and come back as a request for three more. A church friend wanted the one for her hands. A coworker asked what we were using on our face. Word of mouth did what no advertising could, because the results were on people’s skin for everyone to see.

Ten years on, that is still how Tayo’s Skincare grows: one honest bar at a time, from a Black-owned, woman-owned studio in Conyers, Georgia. The recipes are refined now, with twelve numbered formulas for the concerns people bring us most, but the standard has not moved. If we would not put it on our own family, it does not go in the bar.

What goes in, and what never does.

Herbs, spices, nourishing butters, and botanical oils, handcrafted in small batches. Handmade soap keeps its glycerin, the natural humectant that repairs dry, cracked, irritated skin instead of drying it further. No detergents. No synthetic fragrance. Nothing we would not use ourselves.

  • Shea butter
  • Cocoa butter
  • Mango butter
  • Avocado oil
  • Castor oil
  • Sweet almond oil
  • Rice bran oil
  • Olive oil
  • Coconut oil
  • Neem & moringa
  • Turmeric & ginger
  • Honey & yogurt
  • Aloe & papaya
  • Sea salt & clays
Shop the twelve formulas
The Restorative Gift Bundle open in its box

Tell us about your skin.

That is how every formula here began. Write to the studio and we will point you to the bar that was made for exactly that.

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