Why King Charles Chose Hairy Highlander
- Aug 8
- 3 min read
It still feels slightly surreal writing this, but if you saw the stories in the newspapers about King Charles' new midge-repellent beard oil, you may not have realised that the small company behind it was us.
Hairy Highlander.
Which raises a fairly obvious question. Why us?
We have no connection to the Royal Family. We're not aristocrats, we're not an old London grooming house and we're certainly not a multinational cosmetics company. We're a small independent business in the North of Scotland making organic beard products.
The answer, we think, is much simpler. It's because of our connection to the land.
Hairy Highlander has always been about creating products that genuinely come from Scotland, rather than simply using Scotland as part of the branding. We make luxury beard care using natural and organic ingredients, but over the years we've also developed a fairly unusual knowledge of the wild ingredients growing around us and how they can be used in our products.
We forage here. We make our products here. We spend an enormous amount of time in the forests, around the lochs and in the hills that inspire what we create.
So when it came to developing something for Balmoral, we were able to approach it in a way that very few beard companies could.
The brief eventually resulted in something that understandably caught the attention of the newspapers: a luxury beard oil with natural midge-repellent properties.
It sounds mad until you've spent a summer in the Highlands.
But it wasn't simply about keeping midges away. It still had to be a genuinely exceptional beard oil. It had to feel luxurious, smell incredible and, importantly, feel like it belonged at Balmoral.
The finished product was presented to King Charles himself. He smelled it, approved it, and it was chosen for the giftshop at Balmoral.
For us, that's the part of the story we're most proud of.
Not because we're royalists or because we have some special connection to the Royal Family, because we don't.
We're proud because a small Highland company was given the opportunity to create something at that level because of what we've spent years learning about this landscape.
There are plenty of companies that can make a beard oil. There are plenty that can create something with pine or fir in it and give it a Scottish name.
What we do is a little different. Scotland isn't just written on our bottles. It's actually inside them.
And that brings us to Forest Fir.
If you're interested in what a beard oil fit for a King actually smells like, Forest Fir is the one you want.
Forest Fir came off the back of the bespoke range we created for King Charles. It isn't the Balmoral beard oil itself, but it carries forward the same approach and is the closest scent to it within our own range.
We use wild chaga gathered from birch forests here in the Highlands and wild bog myrtle gathered from around the lochs of the Cairngorms. We don't simply buy a bottle of Scottish botanical extract and add a few drops to the formula. The ingredients are gathered from the landscape and then go through a long, slow infusion process before they become part of the finished product. It's not the quickest way of making beard oil and it's certainly not the easiest, but that's never really been the point.
And then there is the scent itself.
Forest Fir is a deep, exceptionally refined scent built around Norwegian fir, with the crisp green character of the forest softened by the warmth of clove and lifted by bright, elegant bergamot. Wild bog myrtle brings something distinctly Highland to the fragrance, adding an aromatic, gently resinous depth that makes it feel less like a conventional forest scent and more like stepping into an ancient Scottish woodland after rain. It is rich without being heavy, fresh without becoming sharp, and quietly luxurious rather than overpowering - a complex, beautifully balanced fragrance that develops in the beard and feels every bit as exquisite as the story behind it.
Forest Fir exists because we wanted to take everything we'd learned through creating that bespoke range and make something of our own that carried the same connection to the Highlands.
Something that wasn't simply inspired by Scotland, but was actually made from it.
If you've ever wondered what a beard oil fit for a King actually smells like, Forest Fir is our answer.
Forest Fir is available across our luxury organic collection:
Made with wild Highland botanicals and presented in luxury biophotonic glass.
