About Trebalm

Who publishes Trebalm, what it is for, how it is funded, and the standards every page is held to.

Trebalm is a reference site about balms and salves: anhydrous, water-free skincare made from oils, fats and waxes. It exists because the information on this subject is unusually poor. Craft recipes are copied from one blog to the next without anyone checking the arithmetic, supplier marketing is mistaken for materials science, and the genuinely useful technical literature sits behind paywalls in food-science journals where no maker will ever find it.

What we are trying to do

Three things, in this order.

1. Get the numbers right. Melting points, percentage windows, pour temperatures, fatty acid profiles and container fill weights are the load-bearing facts in this subject. We keep a single canonical dataset so that every page agrees with every other page, and we present values as the ranges they really are rather than as false precision.
2. Explain the mechanism. Knowing that shea butter goes grainy is not useful. Knowing that it is the stearin-rich triglycerides crystallising into the beta polymorph and coarsening over days, and that the liquid oil you blended it with changes how fast that happens, tells you what to change.
3. Say what is not known. A good deal of what circulates about balms is untested rather than wrong. There is, for instance, no peer-reviewed literature on cosmetic shea graininess at all, and no published comedogenicity data on beeswax in either direction. Pages that pretend otherwise are worse than useless, so we mark the gaps.

Who writes it

Trebalm is produced by a small editorial desk. We publish under the desk's name rather than inventing author personas, because a byline is only worth something if it means a specific person is accountable for a specific claim, and we would rather put that accountability where it belongs: in the sources list, the methodology note and the corrections log.

What that means in practice is that you should judge any page here on whether its claims are traceable, not on whose name is at the top. Every substantive factual page carries a sources list. Where a figure is a workshop rule of thumb rather than a measurement, we label it as one. Where two published studies disagree, we say so and show both.

How Trebalm is funded

The site carries advertising. It sells no products, runs no affiliate links, takes no payment for coverage and has no commercial relationship with any ingredient supplier, packaging supplier or brand. Nothing on this site is written to sell you anything, which is why our comparison pages compare ingredients and methods rather than shops.

What Trebalm is not

How the site is organised

Eight sections, each a map of one part of the subject: basics for the physics, ingredients for the materials, formulas for the recipes and the reasoning behind them, troubleshooting for when a batch goes wrong, making for the craft and the compliance, guides for people who buy balms rather than make them, comparisons for the head to head decisions, and tools for the arithmetic. The glossary defines the vocabulary, and the full index lists everything.

Standards, methods and corrections

Three companion pages set out how we work: our editorial standards cover sourcing, independence and claim discipline; the methodology note explains where our numbers come from and how we derive the ones we calculate ourselves; and the corrections page logs every substantive fix with a date. If you find an error, please tell us. We would rather be corrected than be quoted.