Our Story

Roots

It began with a tree.  A scruffy tree clinging to the side of a mountain.  Glossy, evergreen, lance-shaped leaves.  Scraggly limbs crusted with lichens.  Knuckled roots digging into rocky soil.  And a haunting scent in the breeze — spicy, peppery, funky, with hints of cinnamon, eucalyptus, and clove.

Let's pick some leaves and bring them home.  What could we do with them?  Can we try cooking with them?  What about making a wreath to hang on the front door for Christmas?  Let’s look up the tree in a book.  It turns out that it’s a distant cousin of the “bay” in bay rum, that aftershave that is the most timeless of men’s products — the scent of your grandfather and a thousand small-town barber shops.  Could it work in an aftershave?

Mountain

Not long before our daughter was born, we moved into a gray house with a red door in the town of Mill Valley, at the foot of Mount Tamalpais.  Known and loved by locals as “Mount Tam,” Mount Tamalpais (“tam-al-PIE-iss”) rises 2,743 feet above San Francisco Bay.  Stands of Douglas Fir stretch north along its rolling ridges.  Pockets of old-growth Redwoods endure in its deeper valleys.  Columns of Monterey Cypress march along old carriage roads.  Groves of California Bay Laurel shelter along the banks of hidden creeks.  Most mornings, fog rolls in off the Pacific Ocean to cloak its western slopes in silence.  The mountain is home to bobcats, coyotes, quail, deer, hawks, salmon, and perhaps the occasional mountain lion.  From towns huddled in the valleys below, trails wind their way up through forests, across chaparral and grasslands, to rocky peaks overlooking Marin County and the waters beyond.

Birth

Starting when she was seven days old, we took our daughter hiking nearly every day on those trails.  Snuggled against our chests, she would sleep.  But as she grew, she awoke to the world around her.  Opening her eyes, she was entranced by leaves fluttering in the breeze, clouds sailing across the sky, and patterns of light and shadow dappling the forest floor.  She listened to bird calls, the far-off murmur of the sea, and the sound of our voices as we taught her the names of the rocks and plants and animals.  She felt the rough bark of tree trunks, the fuzzy undersides of leaves, and smooth cool stones.  Under her sniffing nose, we held wildflowers and crushed pine needles.  As do all parents, we awoke to the world anew.

Of course, we took her to see the scruffy tree clinging to the side of the mountain.  We plucked a leaf, rubbed it between our fingers, held it to her nose, then held it again to our own.  And again we thought, could this be captured?  Not just the smell of this tree, but all of it?  Is there a way to take the mountain home?  A way to share it?

Name

And so it began on a mountain in the open air of Northern California.  But, in a way, it also began in a musty botanical library, probably by candlelight, in England, nearly two centuries ago.  In 1841, two British botanists — Sir William Jackson Hooker and George Arnott Walker Arnott, Esq. — published “The Botany of Captain Beechey's Voyage,” which comprised “an account of the plants collected during the voyage to the Pacific and Bering’s Strait, performed in His Majesty’s ship ‘Blossom,’ under the command of Captain F. W. Beechey in the years 1825, 26, 27, and 28.”  In 485 pages and 49 hand-drawn illustrations, Hooker and Arnott described hundreds of North American plants, many of them previously unknown to Western science.  Among them, on page 159, was a species of laurel that they dubbed Laurineae Tetranthera Californica, and which we know today as the California Bay Laurel (Umbellularia californica).

This is the scruffy tree on the side of the mountain.  If you search for the California Bay Laurel in a botanical guide, you will find next to it the names of Hooker and Arnott, with whom the plant will be forever associated.  If your botanical guide is an actual book, printed when ink and paper were precious, Hooker’s name may be abbreviated, as it often is, as “Hook.”  Hence the name “Hook & Arnott” — a tribute to their spirit of discovery, to their reverence for the wonders of our natural world, and to their legacy of adventure in the wilds of the great American West. 

Growth

After hours and days and months of collecting (leaves, needles, berries, flowers, bark, branches, roots), experimenting (tinctures, infusions, decoctions, and near-disastrous steam distillation with a homemade still), testing (spreadsheets, test tubes, beakers, droppers, clinking clutter of Sharpie-labeled bottles), and trying again (down the drain and onto the next) — finally, we had it.  Formula number 67.  A really good aftershave; something to share.

And then, 2020.  Suddenly, hand sanitizer was in short supply, thanks in part to a bunch of bozos who bought it all up to flip at a profit.  Drug store shelves were even empty where the rubbing alcohol once was.  People were scared.  We were too.  But by then we had an industrial alcohol user’s permit and a relationship with a trustworthy ethanol supplier.  So we decided to make hand sanitizer to give to our neighbors and to scrappy local businesses.  We figured that it may as well smell good and remind people of the natural world that was quietly waiting out there, outside their quarantine walls.  So we took formula number 67 and reformulated it into an alcohol-based hand sanitizer gel, and, later, a hand sanitizer spray.  And we made a big batch of it and put it in bottles.  And then we gave it away.

 

— Chrissy & Alex