In the Cabinet with Femke Nauta
Femke Nauta · Founder, Havik & Linde · Amsterdam, Netherlands Independent apothecary · Dutch and Scandinavian clean beauty Length: ~1,130 words
There is no music in Havik & Linde. There is a long limestone counter, a wall of pale oak shelving holding fewer products than most people expect, and a kettle that Femke Nauta puts on for anyone who stays longer than ten minutes. Her shop sits on a quiet stretch of the Haarlemmerbuurt, and she has spent six years arguing — gently, persistently — that a good beauty shelf is defined by what isn't on it. "I am not a supermarket," she says. "I am a person with an opinion."
You trained as an architect. How did that become an apothecary?
Badly, at first. I was designing hotel interiors and I kept ending up in the bathrooms — specifying the amenities, arguing about the amenities, being told nobody notices the amenities. But people do. It's the most intimate room in a building. You are undressed, you are half-awake, you are looking at your own face. Whatever you put in that room is going to be handled by someone at their least defended.
So I started paying attention to what was actually in those bottles, and I was genuinely shocked. Not by anything scandalous — by how thoughtless it was. Beautiful glass, forty-two ingredients, no reason for any of them. I left the practice in 2019 with a very unglamorous spreadsheet of Dutch and Danish formulators and a lease I could not really afford.
The shop is still an architectural project, honestly. Same discipline. Load-bearing elements only.
You carry fewer than sixty products. How does something earn a place?
I have three tests and a product has to pass all three, which is why the number stays low.
First: does the formulation make sense to a chemist? I don't mean "is it natural" — natural is a marketing word, and a badly built natural formula is worse than a well-built synthetic one. I mean is the actives level meaningful, is the preservation system honest, does the pH match the claim. I have a formulator friend in Utrecht who reads INCI lists for me over wine. It is not a glamorous friendship but it is a load-bearing one.
Second: does the founder answer the phone? I have declined brands I loved because I couldn't get a straight answer about a supply chain. If you can't tell me where the ylang comes from and what you paid for it, I assume you don't know, and if you don't know, I can't stand behind it in front of a customer who is spending eighty euros.
Third — and this is the one nobody likes — will a real person finish the bottle? So much clean beauty is bought once, admired, and abandoned half-full on a shelf. That's not sustainability, that's decoration. I want repeat purchase. Repeat purchase is the only honest review there is.
What's changing in how Dutch customers buy?
Two things, and they pull in opposite directions, which makes my job interesting.
The first is that the Dutch customer has become extremely literate. Five years ago I explained what niacinamide was four times a day. Now people arrive having already read the study, and what they want from me is judgement — not information. They want someone to say "yes, that's good, but not for you." That's a completely different retail skill. It's closer to a wine merchant than a pharmacy.
The second is a real fatigue with routine. The ten-step thing has properly broken here. People are coming in and saying, almost apologetically, "I want to use less." There is a whole quiet movement of women in their thirties and forties deliberately shrinking their shelves, and the products winning are the ones that do two jobs beautifully instead of one job perfectly.
And fragrance — fragrance has changed most of all. The Dutch were, let's be kind, not a fragrance culture. Now I sell more scent than serum in December. But it is not the loud designer thing. It's a green tea water someone sprays after a shower, or a monoï-and-tiaré body oil that turns an ordinary evening into something. Scent as a mood, not as a signature.
Your own routine — what actually happens?
It's embarrassingly short and it has not changed in four years.
Morning: cold water, nothing else, then a very light emulsion and SPF. I don't cleanse in the morning. I never have. My skin is a barrier, not a floor.
Evening is where the ritual is. A balm cleanser, taken off with a cloth that is hot enough to be slightly unpleasant — that's the whole treatment, honestly, the heat and the two minutes. Then one oil. In winter something rich and a bit resinous; in summer a lighter rosehip type. And then a body oil, always, on damp skin, standing on a towel in a cold bathroom like a Calvinist.
The non-negotiable is that last one. The body oil. I have skipped serums for a week and not noticed. I skip the body oil and I feel unfinished all day, which tells you it was never about the skin.
Holy grail categories, if you want the shortlist: a proper balm cleanser, one honest facial oil, one body oil with a scent you'd wear on its own, and a room-and-linen spray in something green and cold. That's a life.
One piece of advice for someone moving to clean skincare?
Do it slowly and do it in the boring order.
Everyone wants to start with the serum, because the serum is the interesting one. Start with cleanser and body. They are the two products you use in the largest quantity, over the largest surface area, most consistently — so they are where switching actually changes something, and they are cheap enough to get wrong.
And give it three months before you judge anything. Your skin has been managed by a fairly aggressive system for years; it will be confused for a while. Confusion is not failure. The mistake I see every single week is someone abandoning a good product on day nine.
The Quick-Fire Round
Morning or evening routine? Evening. Morning is maintenance. Evening is where you actually meet yourself.
Scent notes that define you? Cold green tea, wet stone, and something creamy underneath it — vanilla, but the unsweet kind. I want to smell like a greenhouse in February.
The ultimate skincare rule you live by? If it stings, it is not working. It is doing something, which is not the same thing.
Your current beauty obsession? Scented body oils that aren't apologetic. For a decade body care smelled like nothing so it wouldn't clash with your perfume. Now the body oil is the perfume, and I'm completely converted.
