The Two Oils Inside One Berry: What Sea Buckthorn Actually Is

There's an oil in your skincare that you might not have noticed — not hiding, but working in a way that's almost invisible to describe. No other oil feels quite like it. No other oil behaves like it. This one comes from a berry so aggressively orange it stains everything it touches.

That's Sea Buckthorn. Once you understand what it actually is, you'll never think about your skin the same way.

What Is Sea Buckthorn?

Hippophae rhamnoides is a thorny shrub native to coastal and mountainous regions of Europe and Asia. It grows wild along riverbanks and cliffsides, built to survive frost, drought, and salt spray. It produces small, dense clusters of berries the color of a setting sun: deep amber, red-orange, startlingly vivid. The berries are bracingly tart and incredibly nutritionally dense — used for centuries in Tibetan, Mongolian, and Russian traditional medicine.

For the skin, we're interested in the oil. But here's where most people get it wrong: there isn't just one Sea Buckthorn oil. There are two, and they are genuinely different things.

Berry vs. Seed: Two Oils, Two Jobs

Sea Buckthorn Berry Oil is pressed from the pulp and skin of the fruit itself. This is the oil responsible for that famous deep orange color — and that color is the point. Sea Buckthorn Berry Oil is extraordinarily rich in carotenoids, the pigments responsible for both the color and much of the skin-renewing activity. It's also exceptionally high in palmitoleic acid (Omega-7), a fatty acid that's rare in the plant world and remarkably similar to the lipids found naturally in human skin.

Sea Buckthorn Seed Oil is cold-pressed from the seeds inside the berry. Pale yellow, nearly colorless, with a completely different fatty acid profile — rich in linoleic acid (Omega-6) and alpha-linolenic acid (Omega-3), with a near-ideal 1:1 ratio of Omega-3 to Omega-6. Sea Buckthorn Seed Oil is lighter, more easily absorbed, and works deeper in the skin barrier rather than at the surface.

The short version: Sea Buckthorn Berry Oil works on and just beneath the surface — regenerating, protecting, and feeding the skin's outermost layers. Sea Buckthorn Seed Oil works deeper, reinforcing the lipid barrier, calming inflammation, and supporting long-term skin resilience.

Used together, they cover the full depth of the skin. That's why we use Sea Buckthorn in the way we do.

Where You'll Find It

In our Celestial Pure Glow Oil Serum, Sea Buckthorn Berry Oil works alongside Rosehip, Jojoba, and Hazelnut oils in a dry-touch, fast-absorbing treatment step. In our Cosmic Silk Sealing Serum, it appears in a richer, more occlusive formula designed to seal in everything that came before it.

Neither formula is fluorescent orange. The concentrations are calibrated to be effective without turning your face the color of a sunset — although we'd be lying if we said the idea wasn't a little appealing.

Want to understand what makes Sea Buckthorn Berry Oil so potent? Next up: what carotenoids actually do to your skin.