HABA

The crucial chapter in HABA's story arrived in 1988, five years after the company incorporated, when its chemists finally cracked a process for refining squalane to a purity its rivals could not match. The raw material was an unusual one: liver oil from the blue horn shark, harvested in the cold deep waters off Hokkaido, which is why HABA built its production facility there in 1987 to sit beside one of the world's great fishing grounds. Squalane occurs naturally in human sebum, so the appeal of a near-identical, single-ingredient oil was obvious, but the catch was stability and irritation. HABA's pitch was that by stripping out everything else, it had made an oil the skin would recognize rather than reject. That logic flows directly from the company's founding creed, mutenka, the Japanese term for 'without additives,' which it interpreted strictly: no synthetic fragrance, no parabens, no mineral oil, no tar dyes, no petrochemical surfactants that the brand argued were the hidden cause of so much sensitive-skin distress. Where most cosmetics houses add ingredients to differentiate, HABA differentiated by subtraction. Over the following decades the Squalane Beauty Oil became a quiet institution in Japan, racking up Japanese cosmetics-review accolades and a place in the @cosme Hall of Fame, sold less through advertising than through word of mouth among women with reactive skin. The catalog widened into the G-Lotion, brightening serums, gentle cleansers and a mineral SPF, but every formula was held to the same austere additive-free standard rather than chasing trend ingredients. As animal-derived sourcing drew scrutiny, HABA introduced a plant-based squalane refined from sugarcane, giving the original purity story a sustainable second life. The brand has stayed deliberately niche abroad, a connoisseur's name rather than a mass one, trading on consistency and a refusal to complicate what it considers a finished idea.

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