As a buyer, how could you pick the best one in the market? Marie Kapetanakis, Founder of Kosmea Australia, shares the tips with us.
Rosehip oil now has become a must-have product in women’s beauty regimes around the globe. However, there are different grades of rosehip oil available on the market.
“They all look the same, they all tend to do the same thing, but there is a difference between higher grades！”
The Extraction Process
Rosehip oil is either solvent, cold-pressed or supercritically extracted. Supercritical extraction is known as the superior form of extracting, as no heat enters the product. Despite its name, cold-pressed rosehip oil is often exposed to heat. Rosehip seeds are very hard, almost as hard as a little pebble. If you cold-press rosehip seeds, they generate quite a lot of friction, which generates heat. As we know for vegetable oil or fruit oil, heat is a destroyer of some of the valuable components of antioxidants. When the rosehip is supercritically extracted, carbon dioxide gas is used at high pressure but at low temperature to extract the oil.
Whole Fruit or Part of the Fruit?
When comparing rosehip oil, another difference between brands is that some use oil just from the seed, while others utilise the whole fruit. Using the rosehip skin delivers up to eight times more vitamin A than compared to just using the seed. “We buy the whole rosehips from communities in Southern Africa, we dry them, and then we use the whole fruit. The seed doesn’t give a lot of vitamin A; there is much more vitamin A in the fruit. If you’ve got less vitamin A, you’re not going to get as many anti-ageing benefits. You know if you have a good-quality oil by the vitamin A content – our vitamin A content is 4,000 micrograms per gram,” reveals Maria. By supercritically extracting the oil and using the skin, rosehip oil is also packed with lycopene, beta-carotene, and a small amount of vitamin C.
A Refined Life
Many rosehip oils go through a process of being refined, something that Marie warns people to avoid. “If a product has been refined, it goes rancid very quickly. When you refine something, you’re actually adding more heat to it – and heat destroys many of the valuable antioxidants which are keeping the oil from going off.” She adds, “Most rosehip oils are light with a yellow to a clear colour – this means the product has been refined. We don’t refine our oils and you can see the difference in the colour. Kosmea’s Rosehip Oil has a red tinge. You can see the difference, smell the difference, and most importantly, when you put it on the skin, you can feel the difference because it absorbs into the skin and leaves a matte finish.”
What to look for
While it’s hard as a buyer to know whether a rosehip oil is of a high grade just from looking at the pack, a trick is to find out where the product is sourced.
About our contributor
Kosmea founder Marie Kapetanakis established her business from the kitchen of her Adelaide home back in 1993, and more than 21 years later she now sells her range of natural skin care products throughout Australia as well as to Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, UK and the USA.
