Kakadu plum seed oil

The Kakadu plum, Terminalia ferdinandiana, grows in northern Australia and has been used by Aboriginal peoples for thousands of years. It is famous for one figure: its fruit is among the richest natural sources of vitamin C in the world, many times above an orange.

Here a clarification belongs that skincare often omits. The vitamin C is in the watery part of the fruit, not in the oil pressed from the seeds. Kakadu plum seed oil is an oil — it offers fatty acids and fat-soluble companions, not vitamin C. Anyone buying it for the vitamin C is buying on a misunderstanding, and we would rather not build on one.

What the oil genuinely offers is its profile and its behaviour. It is light to medium in body, with a smooth, rather dry touch, which suits compositions meant to nourish without weighing skin down. It is used in small proportions as part of an oil phase, not as its base.

More interesting than any single raw material is how oils are put together. No single oil does everything: one gives lightness, another body, a third colour or scent. The final feel on skin does not come from choosing one rare ingredient but from the ratio of several — and that is where a serum decides whether it feels luxurious or merely expensive.

In our range, Kakadu plum seed oil is in both the day and night No4. serums, in each as part of the oil phase beside prickly pear, cacay, guava, cucumber and — at night — pequi and maqui. It is one of the materials brought from the other side of the world, which raises the fair question of whether that makes sense. The answer lies in the small batches: full sizes are made after an order, so nothing is bought into a stock that would age on a shelf.