Frankincense and myrrh were the Magi's gifts. Medieval healers ground them into wound salves. The recipe is in the oldest medical book of the Latin West, written around 795.

Sea moss (Chondrus crispus) is up to half carrageenan. It holds water on your hair and dries into a soft, flexible film.

The oldest garden plan in Europe is a monastery herb garden. Drawn around 820, it has sixteen beds of healing plants.

In the first century, a Greek army surgeon named Dioscorides wrote a book on plants. Europe kept using it for the next 1,500 years.

Medieval herbals used calendula on wounds and broken skin. Poets linked the golden flower to the Virgin Mary. That's how it got the name Mary's gold.

Tallow is rich in fatty acids your skin already uses, like oleic, palmitic, and stearic acid. It melts at body temperature and sinks right in.

In the 840s, an abbot wrote a poem about his garden. Bed by bed, 23 plants. It's the first gardening book of the Middle Ages.

Violet leaf smells nothing like the flower. It's cold, green, and sharp, like cucumber. That's mostly one molecule, at barely one percent of the extract.

Medieval Europe's first medical school was in Salerno. A woman named Trota taught there. Her book on women's medicine was read across Europe for 400 years.

Cedarwood gets its warm, dry scent from cedrol. It can make up a quarter of the oil.

Over 800 years ago, a German abbess named Hildegard of Bingen wrote down the healing uses of 230 plants. Plus 72 birds, 37 fish, and 26 stones.

Rosemary comes from ros marinus, “dew of the sea.” It grows wild along the Mediterranean coast.

Medieval laundresses dried linen over lavender bushes. Its name may come from the Latin lavare, “to wash.”

Peppermint's menthol triggers your skin's cold sensor. It feels cool, but your skin doesn't actually get colder.

Around 800, Charlemagne ordered every royal estate to grow the same plants: 73 herbs and vegetables and 16 fruit trees. Rose, sage, and rosemary made the list.