Pipette

The brand's defining ingredient has a strangely poetic backstory: a form of squalane occurs naturally in vernix, the waxy coating a baby is born wearing, which makes a squalane-based baby line feel less like marketing and more like returning skin to something it already recognises. For decades that emollient was harvested mostly from shark livers — Pipette uses a version brewed instead from sugarcane by engineered microbes, the same fermentation breakthrough that first powered its grown-up sibling skincare brand before this baby spin-off existed.

Launched on Labor Day weekend in 2019, it arrived as the infant-and-new-parent line from a California biotech better known for cracking sustainable squalane production. The pitch was radical brevity: the shortest possible ingredient decks from the purest sources, stacked with EWG Verified, Leaping Bunny, dermatologist-tested and pediatrician-approved credentials, and floated into the world with model and new mother Rosie Huntington-Whiteley as a launch partner. The opening range ran seven products — a shampoo-and-wash, lotion, oil, wipes and balm for babies, plus belly butter and oil for expecting and postpartum parents — all orbiting that bio-derived squalane.

Then the ground shifted. The biotech parent ran into financial trouble, and the brand was sold off cheaply to a consumer-brand owner that runs it today, a handover that left a genuinely good little line under fresh and largely untested stewardship. The fair skepticism comes in two parts. The 'clean' and 'non-toxic' framing leans on fear-of-chemicals language and third-party seals that aren't always scientifically meaningful, since mainstream baby washes are also rigorously safe — so part of the premium buys positioning. And the brand's stability is an open question in a category parents specifically want to be able to count on. The squalane emollient is a real point of difference from the mineral-oil aisle; the asterisk is the certainty around who's minding it.

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