Issue No. 14 — Winter Reading
Botanical craft, slow formulation, and quiet ritual — written slowly from our atelier on the Mexican coast.
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Mariana Quintero — Editor-in-Chief, head formulator since 2014.
A note from the editor
The Chivitchiva Journal is not a brand blog. It is a small editorial publication we have run alongside our atelier in Sayulita since 2016, gathering long-form essays on the four subjects our work keeps circling back to: how a plant becomes an ingredient, how an ingredient becomes a formula, how a formula becomes a ritual, and how a ritual begins to shape a place.
Field notes from our 22 direct-trade partner farms across Jalisco, Oaxaca, and Nayarit — what we pick, when we pick it, and why we pay 38% above fair-trade benchmarks.
Behind-the-bench writing on micro-batching, the patented Blue Agave & Copal resin infusion, and what 250-unit production runs preserve that larger batches cannot.
Essays on coastal Sayulita life — the salt air, the marigold harvest, the small rituals that shape a year on the Nayarit shoreline.
How readers actually use the formulas — slow bath architecture, gifting craft, and the small physical acts that turn a Sunday into a ceremony.
The current issue
This season's long reads follow a single copal resin from Jalisco forest floor to apothecary bottle — told from four vantage points: the harvester, the formulator, the botanist, the reader.
We followed our longest-standing resin supplier through a full tapping season — from the first incision on the copal tree in March to the final sorting table in late autumn. What we found reshaped how we macerate every bath oil on our shelf.
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The ethnobotanist who co-developed our signature plant complex in 2021 walks us through eighteen months of maceration trials, the moment we nearly abandoned copal entirely, and what makes a 250-unit batch behave differently from a 2,500-unit one.
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Twelve small observations from the atelier — what to blend in January when the sea is grey, what to reach for in August when the marigolds come in, and why our slow-shipment windows follow the tide more than the calendar.
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A reader-tested framework for building a bath practice that survives the rest of the week — drawn from hundreds of letters we received after last year's gifting guide ran.
Read the essay →"A botanical is not a list of compounds. It is a year of weather, a hand that picked it, a slow oil that carried it forward. To write about plants honestly is to write about all three."
Most-read in the archive
An ingredient deep-dive drawn from the 11,800+ Trustpilot reviews readers have left us since 2014, including the exact post-bath pour our founder has used every Sunday for nine years.
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Our most-circulated essay of 2023 — the exact four-SKU combination our concierge team assembles for first-time clients, and the handwritten card template Mariana signs each one with.
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An essay built around the 4,200-member refill community — what they rinse their bottles with, what they blend at home between refills, and the small design changes we've made to the program since 2022.
Read the piece →The Journal sits inside a press-recognized brand voice.
