There was always a jar
⟨Vikas SURNAME⟩ grew up in a house where certain things were simply present.
A jar of dark resin at the back of a cupboard, kept for ⟨WHO — grandfather? father?⟩. Amla, which ⟨WHO⟩ ate fresh and which nobody under the age of thirty could stand, because it is astonishingly sour. Triphala powder measured out by eye, never weighed.
Nobody in the house called this Ayurveda. It didn’t have a name. It was just what was in the kitchen, in the same way that other households have a particular brand of tea.
⟨ONE SPECIFIC MEMORY — a person, a moment, a smell. Two or three sentences. This is the part of the page people will remember, and it’s the only part I can’t write for you.⟩
Then I looked at what was being sold here
Years later, in the UK, I went looking for the same things.
What I found was recognisable but not quite right. Shilajit sold as “raw” and “wild” — words that sound like authenticity but actually describe an unpurified product, which every classical text is emphatic you should not take. Triphala with no indication of what proportion of which fruit. Almost nothing anywhere about where any of it came from.
And prices from four pounds to sixty for what was ostensibly the same substance.
So I started reading properly, which turned out to be a mistake if the goal was staying comfortable.
What I found
Shilajit forms inside rock, and takes up what the rock contains. Analyses of commercial products have turned up lead, arsenic, mercury and cadmium; a 2025 study found elevated thallium across several supplements already on sale. Fulvic acid content — the number everyone puts on the front of the pack — has been found to vary between products by several orders of magnitude.
Meanwhile the marketing had settled into a shape. Everything boosted something. Everything was backed by five thousand years. Almost nobody published a laboratory certificate.
The gap between those two pictures is the reason this company exists.
What we decided to do instead
Three commitments, and they’re the whole business:
Publish the certificate for every batch. Not a summary, not “available on request,” not a representative document for a different batch. The analysis of the batch you actually have, linked from the product page — and we say plainly whose analysis it is.
Say what we don’t know. The research on these substances is thinner than the industry suggests — small trials, limited replication, and a real problem generalising between products that vary this much. Our library says so. On the same pages where we sell things.
Describe rather than promise. You won’t find the word “supports” anywhere on this site. We’ll tell you what something is, where it came from, what the classical texts say about it and what the research has established. What it does for you is not a claim we’re able to make honestly, so we don’t make it.
The third one costs us sales. We’ve decided we’d rather have the kind of customer who notices.
Where we are now
Small, new, and three products in.
⟨SURNAME⟩ runs this from ⟨CITY⟩. The herbs come from ⟨REGION⟩ in ⟨STATE⟩, from a producer we’ve ⟨visited / vetted / worked with since —⟩. Orders go through Amazon and eBay for now, because a company this size shouldn’t be handling its own payments before it’s earned the right to.
We’ll add products slowly, and only when we can document them to the standard above.
If you want to check any of it, the certificates are published and the sourcing page names names.