Meet the herbs
Lavender / 薰衣草
Found in these Herbriva bars:Lavender Shampoo Bar, Rose Sea Salt Shampoo Bar
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What it is
Lavender is the odd one out in this range. It is not a Chinese plant and it has no place in the classical herbal literature — it arrived in 1964, when French cultivars were brought from the Beijing Botanical Garden and planted in the Ili valley to see whether they would take.
They took. Ili sits at the same latitude as Provence, and the valley now produces almost all of China's lavender. Two cultivars were selected out of that work, and they are still the only ones the protected designation allows.
Cut at the end of June, and in the still within twelve hours. The interval is written into the standard, because that is roughly how long the oil stays where it is supposed to be.
Terroir
The ground it grows on
The Ili valley sits between 540 and 900 metres, on sandy loam at pH 7 to 7.9, with 2,870 hours of sun a year and the wettest air in Xinjiang.
Read note ↗Processing
From field to jar
Steam, at one and a half megapascals, for forty-five to sixty minutes, within twelve hours of cutting. Then two days standing still, and nothing added.
Read note ↗Grading
How it was judged
Colour, clarity, and one number. Everything a buyer needs is visible in the bottle, except the figure that actually sets the price.
Read note ↗In the tradition
There isn't one, and it would be dishonest to invent it. Lavender has been in China for sixty years, not six hundred, and it sits in this range on its own terms rather than on inherited ones. What it shares with everything else here is how it is handled: one valley, a fixed harvest window, and a method written down and enforced.
What's in it
Contains linalool and linalyl acetate. Oil carrying the protected designation must run at three percent linalyl acetate or above.
This page describes a plant and its place in Chinese herbal tradition. It is not a description of what our products do, and nothing here is medical advice.
