Olive Oil for Hair and Skin: What Cold Pressed Actually Changes
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Olive oil is the oil everybody already owns, which is exactly why it gets used badly. It is excellent at one job, acceptable at another, and poor at a third.
Where it is excellent: the body, in winter
Olive oil is heavy, high in oleic acid, and slow to absorb. On the face that is a liability. On a body in December it is the entire point.
Warm it, apply before a bath on dry skin, leave ten minutes, then bathe. The warm water opens the skin and the oil goes in rather than sitting on it. This is abhyanga in its simplest form and it is the single best use of a bottle of olive oil outside the kitchen.
Elbows, knees, heels, shins — the places that crack first.
Where it is acceptable: hair
Olive oil coats the hair shaft and smooths the cuticle, so hair feels softer and looks less frizzy immediately. That is real.
What it does not do is penetrate. Oleic acid is a long, kinked molecule — far bigger than the lauric acid in coconut oil — and it largely stays on the surface. The research on reducing protein loss during washing favours coconut clearly.
So: olive oil for immediate softness and frizz, coconut oil for the long game. If you have thick or coarse hair, alternate them. If you have fine hair, olive will weigh it down.
Where it is poor: the face
Olive oil is moderately comedogenic and high in oleic acid, which for a fair number of people disrupts the skin barrier rather than supporting it. It is also one of the oils most often implicated in making eczema-prone skin worse.
There are better face oils and no good reason to insist on this one.
What cold pressed means
Cold pressed — the fruit is pressed mechanically without heat or solvents. The minor compounds survive, which is what you are paying for.
Refined — extracted with heat and solvents, then deodorised. Still a fat, but stripped of most of what makes olive oil interesting.
Pomace — solvent-extracted from the leftover pulp and skins after pressing. Cheap, widely sold in India as "olive oil for massage", and not what you want on your skin.
A real cold pressed oil is green-gold, smells faintly of olives and slightly peppery, and comes in a dark bottle. Pomace oil is pale and smells of almost nothing.
How to use it
Body, before the bath
- Warm a little by standing the bottle in hot water.
- Massage into dry skin, working towards the heart.
- Leave ten to fifteen minutes.
- Bathe as usual. No soap on the areas you most wanted oiled.
Hair, before a wash
- Warm it. Apply to the lengths and ends rather than the scalp.
- Leave an hour.
- Shampoo on dry oiled hair first, then wet and lather.
Dry patches
A few drops on heels, elbows and cuticles at night. Socks over the heels.
As a carrier
Olive works as a carrier for essential oils at the standard rate — four drops in 10ml — but it is heavy, and for anything going on the face or scalp, coconut or almond is the better base.
Our virgin olive oil is cold pressed and food grade. It is also one of the four in The Everyday Oil Box, alongside coconut, neem and kalonji.