Argan Oil: The Complete Guide for Face, Hair and Body

In 1920 the French ethnographer Émile Laoust described a grocer in a Moroccan town shop. Two jars stood at his feet. One held olive oil. The other held zit argan, argan oil. He served both with small tin measures on long handles bent into a hook.

Argan stood next to olive oil for a simple reason. People bought it to eat.

A century later the same word is printed on a 30 ml bottle in Sarajevo, and we count what comes out of it in drops.

The word and the tree

Argan is an Amazigh word, and it was written down early. In the first half of the thirteenth century Ibn al-Bayṭār, a pharmacist born in Málaga who died in Damascus in 1248, entered it in his great book of medicines and foods. Ardjân, he noted, is a Berber word, as people said then, and the name of a tree from the far west of the Maghreb.

He added that its fruit gives an oil used for cooking, sweet like olive oil. At least, according to those who had eaten it.

The tree is Argania spinosa. It is the only member of its tropical family north of the Sahara, the family that also includes the shea tree. It grows almost only in south-western Morocco, between the High Atlas and the Anti-Atlas. In 1998 UNESCO made that stretch of land a biosphere reserve: close to two and a half million hectares, home to more than three million people.

In the Souss and the Anti-Atlas, argan has been used for at least a thousand years. At Îgîlîz, the Anti-Atlas stronghold where the Almohad movement began, archaeologists found argan charcoal and nut shells predominating in many layers from the tenth to the thirteenth century. The tree was fuel, fodder and oil.

The first description to reach Europe came from Leo Africanus in 1526. In the region of Haha he described thorny trees with a fruit like the olives brought over from Spain, a fruit the local people called arga. Its oil went into food and into lamps. He also described how it was eaten: poured over barley porridge, with the whole family standing round one dish and eating with their fingers, no spoons.

At Hadecchis, in the same region, the yearly fair lasted fifteen days. Argan oil was sold there alongside cattle, butter, wool, iron and cloth.

In 1804 the Spanish traveller Domingo Badía, better known as Ali Bey, crossed an argan forest ten to twelve days' journey long. He wrote a question in his account: could this tree not be transplanted to southern Europe? Such an acquisition, in his opinion, would be worth more than an extra province.

As late as 1931 a French handbook on Morocco recorded that argan was a highly prized cooking oil in the Souss, and that many people in Mogador, today's Essaouira, still preferred it to olive oil.

A forest nobody planted

Ali Bey also wrote that the argan multiplies by itself, without any help. That is how it looks to a traveller who spends ten days passing through.

Traditionally, argan is not planted, grafted or grown from cuttings. Farmers protect the seedlings that come up on their own, often in the walls around their fields, and prune, thin and shape the trees over years. A great single-trunked argan is the work of several generations.

A forestry engineer, Mohtar Ba, counted seventeen shapes that people give the argan and gave each a name, from "parasol pine" and "umbrella" to "staircase", "bush" and "green rock". Near villages, argan trunks become living hedges, and in places the trunks are literally woven together.

Every tree has an owner, or someone with rights to it. Every village also keeps one or more sacred trees, often fenced, beside a saint's tomb. Their harvest is marked by women's rituals on fixed dates in the farming calendar.

From May to September parts of the forest are closed. Both the season and the closed places are called agdal. During the agdal only those with rights may gather the fruit, and the closed ground is often marked with piles of stones.

One oil for everything

For a long time the villages of the Souss had one argan oil, made from roasted kernels, for the kitchen and the face alike. Women used it to cook tagines and couscous, and to soften their hands and faces.

Around Tiznit, women massaged their scalps with the oil they had used to roll the couscous.

My family is from the Souss. At home we always had two bottles of argan: one to eat, and one for face, body and hair. From the first we added argan to all kinds of dishes and ate it in amlou: roasted almonds ground and kneaded with honey and argan oil. Amlou is my Nutella of life, as it is for a lot of Moroccans.

The oil had a festive side. It went into dishes for feasts and was given as a wedding present. Oil from sacred or exceptional trees was pressed separately and given away, because it was held to carry baraka, the blessing Bosnians call bereket.

Taste, too, belonged to a tribe. The tribes around Essaouira liked a mild oil from lightly roasted kernels; the Ait Ba'amran preferred a strong one from heavily roasted kernels. Some flavoured theirs with wormwood, others with chilli or thyme.

Inland people said the sea changed the taste of coastal oil. Coastal people said the same about mountain oil and the altitude.

Argan oil once burned in lamps and went into soap. It lost those jobs over time, and kept the kitchen and the care of the body.

How it was made

The fruit ripens in summer and is gathered once a year, in July and August. It is dried in the sun; the dried fruit is called afyach in Tashelhit. Then the pulp, alig, is taken off.

The nut is cracked between two stones to free the kernels, tiznin. The kernels are roasted for a few minutes on an earthenware plate and ground in a hand mill made of two stones. The paste is kneaded by hand, with warm water added in exact amounts, until the oil comes out.

Women tell long, thin and small thick kernels apart and have names for them: tarzift, tazdit, tdnit. From the kernel they know which tree the fruit came from. They mix the types on purpose, because the mix is what makes a good oil. Nuts left too long in the sun are called ertbrint, "too much sun", and are soaked in water for a whole day so the kernel comes out whole.

Girls joined the work from the age of six, but only to gather fruit and remove the pulp. Cracking, milling and kneading were for married women. On her marriage a woman received from her mother the hand mill and the cracking stone, as part of her dowry.

The work in a household was divided. The man mostly tended the trees and held nearly all the rights to them. The woman brought the tools, the knowledge and the skill to turn kernels into oil.

One litre of oil takes about two and a half kilos of kernels, and the kernel is only about three per cent of the fresh fruit's weight. Each nut holds one to three of them. By hand, a litre is at least a full working day for one woman. Cracking the nuts remained hand work even in the cooperatives researchers studied, because no suitable machine existed.

At home, oil was made when an occasion called for it, and only small amounts went to the souk, when the household needed cash.

In 2014 UNESCO inscribed this know-how, which mothers teach their daughters from a young age, on its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Since 2021 the United Nations has marked 10 May as the International Day of Argania.

Kitchen oil and skin oil

Until the mid-1990s argan oil was made entirely by hand, at home. The modern industry is dated from 1996, when the first women's cooperative with a partly mechanised process was founded.

In 2009 argan became the first Moroccan product with a protected geographical indication, described as the first on the African continent. In 2011 researchers recorded that rising argan prices had allowed some rural households to spend more and to send their daughters to secondary school.

With the cooperatives, one oil became two. For the kitchen, the kernels are still roasted for a few minutes, which gives the oil the taste and smell of toasted hazelnut. For the skin, that step is skipped and the oil is pressed from raw kernels.

The hand mill only grinds roasted kernels, so skin oil has needed a press from the start. Today cooperatives mostly press by machine, with no water added.

Our 100% argan oil has one ingredient, Argania Spinosa Kernel Oil. It is cold-pressed and unrefined. It softens and smooths the skin, sinks in quickly and leaves no greasy film.

We source our ingredients from more than 160 women's cooperatives across Morocco, and Moroccan labs make the products. Our argan oil is made by cooperatives in the Souss-Massa region, where the argan trees flourish.

How many drops for face, hair and body

A 30 ml bottle holds 600 drops, and a face needs one to three. That is between 200 and 600 applications to the face from one bottle.

Argan is one of those ingredients worth using sparingly. One bottle does face, hair and body, which leaves room on the shelf.

Face

Put one to three drops in your palm, rub your palms together and press the oil into clean, slightly damp skin. Argan is the last step.

If your skin is on the oily side, start with one drop; on dry days, use three. You can use it every day. The order with cream and sunscreen is in our guide on how to apply argan oil to your face.

Hair

Two to four drops, a little more for long hair. Rub them between your palms and run your hands over the lengths and ends, on dry or damp hair. Argan smooths the ends and leaves hair softer to the touch. More in our guide on how to use argan oil on hair.

Body and hands

A few drops on dry elbows, knees, hands or the skin around the nails. It spreads most easily after a shower, while the skin is still slightly damp.

How to recognise good argan oil

Start with the label. A bottle of pure argan oil lists one ingredient, Argania Spinosa Kernel Oil: the Latin name of the tree and the part the oil comes from, the kernel.

Then look at the colour. Moroccan law describes oil from unroasted kernels as light yellow, and oil from roasted kernels as darker, up to orange-yellow. The darker one now goes to the kitchen.

Last, the smell. Refined oil has been bleached and deodorised, which takes out both its colour and its scent. Unrefined oil keeps argan's nutty smell.

Smell is easiest to judge in person. At our shop in Sarajevo City Center you can smell the argan and try it on your palm before you buy. More checks are in our guide on how to recognise pure argan oil, and the laboratory data on our oil are on the argan oil specification page.

How to store argan oil

Keep it cool, away from sun and heat, in a tightly closed bottle of dark amber glass. It is better off in a drawer or a cupboard in another room than on the shelf by the shower, steamed every morning.

The grocer of 1920 served argan with a tin measure.

Your measure is a drop. The same kernel, unroasted.