In 2007, two young American beauty companies focused on oil. In Los Angeles, the then 29-year-old model Josie Maran developed a cosmetics line of the same name based around argan oil, which was still a relatively dark ingredient in the USA. At the same time, fashion stylist Linda Rodin, then in her late 50s, was tinkering with neroli, jasmine, and other oils she’d bought in a health food store at home in New York, and shared the resulting elixir with models and fashion editors. While Maran positioned their products as environmentally friendly, socially conscious and accessible, Rodin’s compound Rodin Olio Lusso with its disheveled silver chignon had little backstory beyond its creator’s crazy charisma. It was a fashion insider’s exclusive accessory, and Rodin personally looked after each batch. (Estée Lauder acquired Rodin Olio Lusso in 2014, but will cease production later that year.)
Up to this point in time, vegetable oils were fairly unknown in common western beauty products, were included, if at all, in the small print of the ingredient lists and otherwise remained inhaled as an aid for therapeutic massages in the inventory of food cooperatives and clinics for alternative medicine and palliative care, to relieve fear and pain. They were treated as remedies, not fancy goods, which made them a resurgence as the line between health and beauty blurred. With chronic disease rates rising in the United States – driven in part by a diet that was newly dependent on high fructose corn syrup, introduced in 1967 and ubiquitous in the 1980s – and access to health care that is precarious and increasingly costly , is the idea of well-being entered colloquial American language: the desire to achieve not only physical, but also mental and spiritual health, beyond narrow medical definitions. With this holistic approach, the outside was inseparable from the inside, and so the beauty industry began to break away from the New Age lexicon, shifting its attitudes from warfare to self-sufficiency, from concealing imperfections to healing and nutrition. (Meanwhile, wellness has grown into its own industry, valued at around $ 4.5 trillion worldwide.)
Oils fit the message. Derived from labor-intensive methods that have largely remained unchanged for centuries, they are totems of a time when life developed more slowly and products had a unique character and were not mass-produced. The strongest of them are called essential oils, according to the medieval alchemist’s idea of Quinta essentia, a fifth essence of heavenly origin – a life force – to be extracted from terrestrial materials. “They capture all of that plant intelligence,” says April Gargiulo, 47, a former winemaker who launched Vintner’s Daughter in Napa Valley, California in 2014 with a single product, a facial serum that combines the potencies of 22 plants, including frankincense and hazelnut. united, cypress and turmeric, soaked and brewed for over three weeks.
She adds ironically, “That might sound a little woo-woo.” However, scientific studies show the antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties of certain essential oils that come from biologically active chemical components of a plant. The molecules in a single drop can number in the trillions, and their small mass makes the oils volatile and quickly evaporates at room temperature. The essential oils are very powerful and are often mixed with milder carrier oils like coconut or avocado or jojoba, a liquid wax from a shrub native to the American Southwest that was long used by Indian tribes but was rediscovered as an additive for in the late 20th century Automatic transmission oil.
Nowadays, an oil can be offered on its own in a standalone do-it-yourself bottle or swirled in golden formulas that smell like flowers. New companies are giving these old world botanicals a high-tech spin, like the Silicon Valley start-up Symbiome, which ferments vitamin-rich buriti oil from an Amazon palm tree to recalibrate imbalances in the human microbiome. Even the luxury brand La Mer – whose name is almost synonymous with its heavy cream wrapped in seaweed – launched a face oil in 2015, followed by a corresponding body oil balm.
