Sea Buckthorn - beautiful yellow

I came accross Sea Buckthorn (Hippophae Rhamnoides) oil more than a year ago when I was surfing the internet late at night.  Come to think of it I think it was around 3 or 4 in the morning and I hadn't been able to sleep.  So there I was exhausted, trying to get sleepy when I came across a website (Naturally thinking) that sold all different kinds of oil.  And the prices were very good, 6£ for a liter of the most common carrier oils like almond, grapeseed, peach!  I could get none of those here and I wanted them.  So I ordered all the 6-£-a-liter bottles and a few small quantities of very exotic oils, which cost a bit more.   Like Argan, Borage and the subject of this post Sea Buckthorn oil which I really didn't know existed before.

When I awoke the next morning I wondered if it had all been a dream, and decided not to think about it (it's a well known coping method sometimes called: Let go, let God.  It works pretty well).  Some days later I got an annoucement that I had 10 liters of oil waiting in customs.  Oops, I hadn't really planned to do this, but now that I had, I just paid the customs and VAT charges and headed happily home and hid the stash from my husband.  That was the real start of my face cream making.  So a very happy ending to that story, but the lesson is: Do NOT have a credit card handy late at night while drowsily surfing the internet.

But enough of that, I was going to say: Sea Buckthorn is a wonderful oil.  It has all sorts of good stuff in it like vitamins A, E, K1 (huh?), minerals like calcium, zink, magnesium, phosphorus AND 22-fatty-acids-42-types-of-lipids-and-36 flavonoids.  It says so on the bottle and I believe it, all except the flavonoids.  I think it must be carotenoids, since flavonoids are water soluble, while carotenoids are oil soluble.

Plant pigments are grouped into a few groups: Flavonoids are water soluble and give plants all sorts of colours (yellow and blue, purple to magenta depending on PH) along with carotenoids (yellow, orange, red), betalaines (orange, red, violet) and porphyrins (green).  Apparently there are thousands of these pigments in nature and their blend produces all the various shades that we see in plants.  Some of these are antioxidants and very good for us.  This is why we should eat as many colours as possible in our vegetables and fruit.

Sea buckthorn oil is yellow to orange, almost red and has a very distinctive smell which I like very much.  The first time I used it I was surprised at how much colour it gave the cream I was making and I have to admit that my face was quite yellow after applying it, not stained though!  So it should not have come as a surprise that is is an excellent soap colourant.  I was composing a recipe rather spontaneously that I intended to be especially good for people with eczema/psoriasis.  I only used about a teaspoon in a 600 g. oil recipe along among other things, St. Johns Wort oil (that has colour too), some aloe vera juice, jojoba oil and oatmeal tea.  I won't post the recipe just yet because the soap is so soft that I can hardly cut it or lift it up without squishing it!  It has the potential to be a lovely soap if it ever hardens, but I may have used too much of unsaponifiable oils in it.  If that is the case I will rebatch it with something really good and get a very good average!  As it is it has the warm, sweet and mellow scent of Sea Buckthorn oil and the strong orangey yellow  colour and it's probably very gentle on the skin and possibly very good for it too.

Next time I will use a little less to see if I can get a lighter yellow.  I also look forward to using the annatto seeds that came in the last package.

The photo: The lovely colours of Sea Buckthorn in soap and cream.  I love to crochet doilies.  I did them when I was a teenager, they were so much fun to do.  I also have a thing for pressed glass.