Why Isn’t Amla In Our Formulations? Here’s What We Actually Ask First

Before Pressed existed, my kitchen counter looked like a small, chaotic apothecary. Rosemary oil in one bottle. Black seed oil in another. A jar of amla powder I never quite finished, because Ayurvedic hair oils are some of the best-documented in the world and I wanted in on it.

Every one of those ingredients was genuinely good. That was never the issue. What I hadn’t learned yet was that “this is a great ingredient” and “this belongs in this formula” are two different questions — and it’s basically the same question I still get asked almost every week, just about different ingredients now. Why isn’t amla in your formulations? Or rosehip. Or whatever’s trending on your feed this month.

The honest answer isn’t that we haven’t heard of it. It’s that being good on its own was never the bar.

“Good on its own” is where most ingredients stop

Almost any botanical earns its place on a “best ingredients for hair” list if you look hard enough. Amla has vitamin C. Rosehip has fatty acids. Rice water has amino acids. None of that is wrong. It’s also not where the real work starts.

A cold-pressed oil and another cold-pressed oil can both be excellent and still not belong in the same bottle. That’s not a flaw in either one. It’s just not a question a good ingredient can answer by itself — someone still has to decide what it’s for, and whether the formula needs it.

What we’re actually asking

Before anything gets near a batch, we’re asking whether it solves a problem nothing else in the formula already solves, whether the evidence behind it is actually specific to hair and scalp rather than borrowed from a headline, and whether it belongs in the story this brand is telling — African botanicals, pressed and distilled close to where they grew — rather than reached for because it’s trending somewhere else entirely.

Amla clears the first two without much argument. It’s a legitimate ingredient with real standing in South Asian hair care, and there’s genuine science behind it. Where it runs into trouble is the third. Baobab — already one of the oils in our Nourishing Hair Oil — brings a comparable vitamin C and antioxidant profile, and it comes from the same African botanical tradition the rest of that formula is built on. Adding amla wouldn’t give it a new job. It would just be a second ingredient doing a job baobab already does, borrowed from a tradition that isn’t ours to reach into casually.

We still test the ones we like — and sometimes still say no

None of this is a philosophy we apply from a distance. We’ve reformulated and tested an ingredient we genuinely wanted to work, and cut it anyway. We considered switching the keratin in our Nourishing Hair Oil to a vegan, plant-based version. We liked the idea of it. We tested it side by side with what we already had. It didn’t perform as well, so we kept the original.

That’s the actual standard: not “does this sound better,” but “does this perform better, in this formula, once we’ve tested it properly.”

Why we press our own oils in the first place

Every formula we make is co-developed with cosmetic scientists and tested as a whole, not assembled from a list of ingredients that were each good in isolation. That’s also why we press and distil most of our own oils in-house rather than buying them premade — it’s the only way to actually control what’s going into the mix, batch by batch, instead of taking a supplier’s word for it.

The bottom line

We’re not against amla, or rosehip, or whatever’s next. We’re against adding an ingredient that doesn’t have a job of its own, isn’t backed by evidence for that specific job, or doesn’t belong in the story a formula is actually telling. A longer ingredient list has never been the same thing as a better one.

So keep asking. “Why isn’t this in your formula” is one of the most useful questions you can put to any brand — including us — because it’s the one that makes the standard impossible to hide behind.