Licorice Root and I Had Words

She texted me first.

Do you think you could make something like this for me?

Then came the pictures. A tin, almost empty. And a label.

She's a friend I came to know because she took extraordinary care of someone I loved. The kind of care you don't forget. The kind of person you show up for when they need something — even when that something turns out to be more complicated than either of you expected.

I looked at the label properly.

Organic Avocado Oil · Organic Grapeseed Oil · Organic Jojoba Oil · Organic Calendula Flower · Organic Licorice Root · Beeswax · Organic Lavender Essential Oil · Organic Tea Tree Essential Oil

This was not a casual formula. Whoever made this original salve knew exactly what they were putting in it and why. My first instinct had been to wonder if this was a simple oil infusion situation — one look at that label and I set that assumption down. This deserved to be taken seriously.

The main player was clear: licorice root.

And licorice root, I was about to discover, had absolutely no interest in making things easy for me.

What the Research Said

Licorice root is not like the other plants I work with.

Most of what I do is straightforward: dried plant material, oil, time. Six to eight weeks and the oil pulls out what it needs. Simple. Patient. It works.

Licorice root looked back at me and laughed.

The research pointed toward water — licorice root's key constituents are largely water-soluble, which means oil alone doesn't get full access to what's actually in the plant. The suggested method involved infusing in water, then slowly evaporating the water off with low heat, leaving a concentrated extract behind that you could then work into oil.

Simple enough in theory. A long, warm, stubborn process in practice.

Five Times of Trying and Licorice Root Winning

I tried it five times.

Different temperatures. Different incorporation methods. Different amounts of patience — which, by attempt four, was running fairly thin.

Every single time I ended up with some version of what you see in that photo. Pale yellow. Brown flecks.

Licorice root had opinions about whether it was going to cooperate and those opinions were consistently no.

I have made some terse remarks in my workshop. I will not repeat them here.

Four Recipes

I didn't stop. That's not really in my nature.

Instead, I changed the question. Instead of how do I make this one method work, I asked what are all the possible ways this could work — and I made one of each.

Recipe one: warm oil infusion, the way I'd approach most plants.

Recipe two: actual licorice root powder worked directly into the base. Effective. A little gritty, she told me later. Honest feedback. I noted it.

Recipe three: a licorice root facial oil I sourced while I kept working the problem.

Recipe four: the one that finally made sense to me. I spritzed the licorice root with alcohol, let the alcohol fully evaporate, then added it to oil for infusion. The alcohol opens things up — gets access to what oil alone can't reach — then steps back and lets the oil do its job.

Four recipes. Four different angles on the same stubborn root.

Where We Are Now

She's working her way through all four.

She loves them. Recipe two was a little gritty — she was kind about it, I noted it. The others are doing what

I hoped they would do.

She took care of someone I loved with her whole self. The least I could do was fail five times and try four more until I got it right.

That's what handmade actually means. Not a formula copied from a trending video. Not a machine that doesn't know your name. Someone who cared enough about one person to stay in the workshop until the answer showed up.

You are home.