Thanaka Aftershave

A razor leaves heat behind. The skin flushes and tightens, stings under water, and by the next morning the follicles have come up in small red points. An herbalist would read that as a hot, excited tissue state and reach for cooling, moistening, settling plants.

In Myanmar they reach for thanaka. The bark is ground on a stone with a little water into a pale gold paste and worn across the cheeks from childhood, two thousand years of it. It goes on against sun and heat, and it goes on after hair is removed. Burmese women have held for generations that hair coming back under thanaka comes back finer and slower, and they have been putting it on for that reason far longer than anyone has been testing why.

We grind it into a cream built on kusumba oil. Kusumba is safflower, kusumbha in the Ayurvedic materia medica, pressed for its oil since antiquity and taken to the skin as readily as to the pot. It is almost entirely linoleic acid, which is the fat that skin uses to rebuild its own barrier, and it sinks in and disappears. Calendula goes in with it, the great dooryard simple of the old European herbals, grown beside kitchen doors for centuries for exactly this, angry skin that needs settling. Tea tree finishes it, clean and green and sparing.

The cream is tan, matte, and unscented but for the plants themselves. Stubble comes back softer under the hand.