Have you or your kids ever had a skin issue that just wouldn't go away, and no doctor could quite figure out?

My name is Alice. I'm part of the research team here at The Simple Folk, and I want to tell you something that happened to me long before I worked here.

As a kid, I had a bad case of atopic dermatitis on my feet. It was painful, and it made me feel uncomfortable in my own skin. My mother took me to dermatologist after dermatologist. She tried every cream on the market. Nothing worked.

Eventually, she had a hunch. The kind only a mother seems to have. Maybe the problem wasn't my skin, maybe it was what was inside my shoes. So she started lining them with soles made from apple skin and cotton instead. Within weeks, something that had followed me for years was simply gone.

I think about that story often, and I sometimes wonder if it's part of why I ended up here, gently investigating the relationship between our skin and everything we wrap it in each day.

Skin is the body's largest organ, around 16 to 22 square feet or 1.5 to 2 square meters of it. Wearing something for eight, ten, twelve hours a day isn't a neutral, decorative act. It has a real, direct effect on our skin's health, and even more so for children, whose skin is still developing and tends to absorb more, and process it more slowly, than ours does.

Researchers studying allergic contact dermatitis have traced it back to a specific, unglamorous list: dyes, finishing resins, softeners, water-repellents, flame retardants, and the solvents used in dry cleaning. Footwear gets its own mention… chromium, often used in leather tanning, is a known trigger for skin sensitization. I can't say for certain that's what was in my shoes as a child. But I don't think it's a coincidence anymore, either.

With The Simple Folk, we spend a lot of time quietly overthinking everything about our products, so that you don't have to… so that dressing your family thoughtfully can feel simple, not like a research project. Alongside Flavia, our product designer, and the rest of the team, we started asking a question that seems obvious in hindsight: how does what we make actually interact with the bodies wearing it? Stories like my mother's, shared across our team in different forms, shaped a lot of what came next.

When I was a kid with cracking feet, my mother was looking for answers. She couldn't find them, because the brand behind those shoes never talked about chemicals, never disclosed anything at all.

We do. We publish our Product Restricted Substances List — a comprehensive set of standards that defines the substances we do not allow in our manufacturing process. It strengthens our commitment to creating products made with greater care. Any mother can consult it (click below!).

Because mothers are already doing the hardest job in the world, quietly, every day. The least we can do is make this one part of it simple.