Not all body oils are equal.
Ours starts differently.

The Answer Begins With Olive Squalane

What is olive squalane — and why does it matter?

Your skin already makes it. That is the starting point.

Squalane is a purified, stabilised form of squalene — a lipid your body produces naturally as part of your own sebum. It is not exotic. It is not imported from somewhere unfamiliar. It is something your skin has always known how to use, because it has always made it itself.

Olive squalane starts with the squalene naturally found in olive fruit. A process called hydrogenation stabilises it completely — making it odourless, colourless, and shelf-stable without any change to its essential character. No sharks. No synthetics. Just olive.

The result is a cosmetically perfect ingredient that behaves exactly as your own skin’s lipid does: it integrates rather than sits, replenishes rather than coats, and absorbs in the time it takes to put a towel down.

The Honest Comparison

Why most body oils fall short

Walk into any pharmacy or department store and you will find hundreds of body oils. Most share the same logic: start with a cheap base oil, add something photogenic, add a fragrance, call it luxury. The problem is not that these ingredients are harmful. The problem is that they were chosen for their story, not their skin science.

Sweet almond oil is pleasant but dominated by oleic acid — a fatty acid that sits heavily on the surface and, in sensitive or compromised skin, can actually impair the skin’s own barrier over time.

Coconut oil is the most aggressively marketed natural skincare ingredient of the last decade. Its antimicrobial credentials are real. So is its comedogenic rating — one of the highest of any commonly used oil. The evidence is considerably thinner than the marketing suggests.

Argan oil is genuinely useful, with a sensible fatty-acid profile. But every premium brand already uses it. It differentiates nothing.

Squalane is different not because it is exotic but because it is exact. It is the only plant-derived oil that structurally matches what your skin already produces. No other oil does this.

A Fair Question

Wait — doesn’t olive oil block pores?

It is a fair question, and one worth answering directly rather than hoping you won’t ask it. Olive oil, used undiluted or at high concentration, is predominantly oleic acid — a fatty acid that can, for some skin types and at significant volume, be comedogenic. This is well-documented. It is the reason we use olive oil as a supporting ingredient at a carefully controlled, minor percentage — not as the base of the formula.

The dominant ingredient — the overwhelming majority of the formula — is squalane, which has a comedogenic rating of zero. The olive oil is present to contribute its genuine emollient warmth and its natural polyphenols, and because its presence connects this formula to the prophetic tradition in a meaningful way. But it sits at a level where its oleic content is cosmetically negligible.

Think of it this way: a teaspoon of olive oil in a litre of water would not make the water oily. Our formula works on the same principle — the squalane leads, the olive oil complements, and the percentage of each is a deliberate decision made with precisely this concern in mind. This is what we mean by the Sunnah Edit: not a recreation of the past in modern packaging, but a meeting of tradition and evidence. The wisdom was always there. The science has simply caught up.

An Honest Price

Why this formula and not another?

If squalane is so effective, why don’t other brands build their formulas around it? Some do — but rarely as the hero ingredient, rarely at meaningful concentration, and rarely from olive. The more common pattern is to list squalane near the bottom of a 30-ingredient INCI: present enough to mention on the front of the bottle, too diluted to do anything material.

The answer is economics. Olive squalane costs significantly more per litre than sweet almond, sunflower, or a mineral oil base. When a brand is formulating to a £3–5 unit cost, building around squalane does not work financially. So the squalane goes in last, in a token amount, while the cheap base carrier does the actual volume.

We made a different calculation. The right formula at an honest price is better than a compromised formula at a competitive one. The Sunnah Edit costs what it costs because it contains what it contains. Every penny goes into the formula. Five ingredients also means five chances for your skin to react — not forty. A formula this short is not a limitation. It is a relief.