About Balm

A shop that will tell you to use less

Three counters in Ghana, ten formulas, and sixty people in Accra who live with every one of them for six weeks before it reaches a shelf.

A Black woman with braids pinned up in a high bun, laughing in a grey houndstooth blazer over a coral jumper, against a plain warm tan wall

How it started

It began at a pharmacy counter in Osu

Yaa Owusu qualified in pharmacy at KNUST in 2010 and spent the next nine years behind a dispensing counter in Osu. She expected to spend a career counting tablets. She spent most of it answering the same question instead, from people who had come in for something else entirely and stayed to ask about their skin.

What she kept finding was people using six things where two would have done. A cleanser, a toner, three serums bought on somebody's advice at a party and a heavy cream over all of it, every one of them working against the next, and the skin worse for the crowd. She started writing routines on the backs of receipts. In 2017 she made the first cream herself, because nothing on the shelf behind her had been formulated for a face that spends the year at thirty degrees and eighty per cent humidity.

12 Lokko Road opened in 2019 with four products on one shelf. The advice has not changed since the counter: use less, use it for longer, and change one thing at a time.

The longer version

10

Formulas on the shelf

Ten. One comes off for every new one that earns a place, which is why the number has not moved in two years.

60

People on the panel

Sixty across Accra. Each of them lives with a formula for six weeks before anybody can buy it.

14

,000

Orders last year

Packed at Lokko Road, most of them inside Greater Accra and most of those before noon.

7

Years open

Osu since 2019, Labone since 2022, Kumasi since 2024. The Lokko Road door has never moved.

A brown hand scooping soft white balm from an open tub on a wooden board, amber dropper bottles, wooden bowls and a small whisk on the white bench around it

The bench at the back of Lokko Road, where a batch of Sawla shea ends up.

Where it comes from

The people who grow it are paid before we sell it

Three ingredients do most of the work in this range and all three are grown within a day's drive of each other in the north. We buy them direct, in person, from the same three suppliers we started with, and we have never bought shea through a broker.

Shea, Sawla

Forty women, one press, unrefined and never bleached. It arrives still smelling of smoke.

Hibiscus, Bolgatanga

Grown, dried and cold pressed inside the same district it was picked in.

Baobab, Upper East

Wild trees nobody planted, picked by people who have picked from them their whole lives.

The price is agreed in January and it holds for the whole year, and we pay on collection rather than on sale. A slow month in Accra is our problem and not theirs. The shea inside a GH₵ 180 jar of renewal cream costs us GH₵ 46, roughly twice what the same weight fetches at Techiman market, and it is the first line we protect on the costing when a season goes badly.

What it all goes into

The panel

Sixty people, and these four have used all of it

Nothing reaches a shelf until sixty people in Accra have lived with it for six weeks and said what happened. These four have been on the panel since the first jar in 2017.

A young Black woman with honey blonde braids pinned up in a high bun, both hands lifted to her neck, bare shoulders against a plain pale grey ground

Teacher, Adenta

Ama Serwaa

Oily by September and tight by December. A cream has to survive both on her or it does not ship.

A young Black man with a short afro and a small gold stud earring, bare shoulders, turned away and looking back over his shoulder against a plain white ground

Barber, Nima

Kwabena Mensah

Shaves twice a day and reacts to most things. He is the reason the milk cleanser carries no fragrance at all.

Nurse, Korle Bu

Efua Boateng

Twelve hour shifts with a mask on for most of them. She tries everything along the jaw first, where it shows.

A Black woman with closely cropped hair and small gold hoop earrings, bare shoulders, looking up past the camera against a dark charcoal ground

Trader, Makola

Nana Adjei

Under a sun that moves round her stall all day. She turned down the first two versions of the SPF for the cast they left.

Free delivery over GH₵ 300

Accra same day if the order is in before noon, Kumasi and Takoradi next day.

Pay on delivery

Momo, card or cash at the door. Nothing leaves the shop before you have seen it.

Thirty days to change your mind

Opened is fine. Skincare that does not suit you is not a thing you should be stuck with.

Tested on deep skin first

Every formula goes to a panel in Accra before it goes anywhere near a shelf.

Still deciding

Tell us what your skin is doing

Send a photograph and a sentence about how it behaves by four in the afternoon. Somebody who works the counter in Osu writes back, usually the same day.

Ask us

Read the questions