The face oil I stopped buying
On the small kitchen pantry product I now use instead of a dedicated face oil — and why a forty-eight-euro bottle has not been replaced.
For about six years I bought a specific dedicated face oil that came in a small dark-glass bottle, cost forty-eight euros, and lasted approximately three months. The brand was respectable, the ingredient list was clean, and the oil did what face oils do — sit on the skin overnight and slowly absorb, leaving the face softer in the morning. I had no complaint with the product.
Then, on a Sunday I was reading the ingredient list more carefully, I noticed that the primary ingredient — by a large margin — was squalane, a stable form of squalene derived from olives. The other ingredients were small fractions of various botanical extracts, a vitamin E for preservation, a fragrance compound. The squalane was almost the entire product.
What I did with this information
I bought a bottle of pure squalane online from a reputable supplier. It cost twelve euros for a hundred millilitres — about a year's supply, given how little oil the face actually needs. I have used it every evening for the eight months since. I have not, in that time, repurchased the forty-eight-euro product.
The face is exactly the same. There is no perceptible difference between the dedicated face oil and the pure squalane underneath it. The expensive product was, more or less, pure squalane with some botanicals added to justify the price and the fragrance.
What pure squalane does on the face
Mimics the natural sebum the skin produces. The molecule is small enough to absorb properly rather than sitting on top of the skin all night. It is non-comedogenic, which means it does not block pores. It has a very long shelf life, because it is chemically stable and does not need preservatives. And it costs about a tenth of what a comparable branded oil costs.
On the small case for ingredient literacy
I am not trying to make a moral argument about the skincare industry. The branded oil was not, in any meaningful sense, a scam. It was a well-formulated product, sold at the price the market will bear. But reading the ingredient list and understanding what was actually in the bottle gave me the option of buying the active ingredient directly, in a much larger quantity, for a much lower price.
The lesson, more generally, is that ingredient lists are short and readable, and that for most skincare categories the active ingredient is something you can buy in pure form for a fraction of the formulated price. The branded products add fragrance, formulation, marketing, and a bottle. None of those things, on most days, is worth the markup.
I have not gone full minimalist about this — I still buy a formulated moisturiser and a formulated cleanser, because those products genuinely benefit from formulation. But the face oil step is now a single ingredient, in a plain bottle, that I can buy for almost nothing. The face has not noticed the change.