Prickly pear seed oil for the face: how a Mexican cactus became a Moroccan oil

In 1974 the rural commune of Sbouya, in the western Anti-Atlas, had 24,237 residents. By the census of 2004 it had 5,028.

The people who left needed a crop that would hold the land while nobody was there.

There is one. You let three or four of its pads dry a little in the sun, then lay them on bare ground. No digging, no fertiliser.

Between 1987 and 2011 the area planted with it in Sbouya grew from 2,390 to 3,720 hectares. In Mesti, another commune of the same area, it grew almost sixfold. In the end it covered more than half of Sbouya.

The plant is opuntia, the prickly pear cactus. The seeds of its fruit now give an oil for the face. The road to a face cream was a long one, and it started in Mexico.

An immigrant with many names

Opuntia is a Mexican plant, and a thoroughly Mexican one. Its name there is nopal, from Nahuatl. On Mexico's coat of arms an eagle perches on a cactus, devouring a snake: the old emblem of Tenochtitlan, the city that became Mexico City.

It is believed to have reached Europe as early as 1493, with Columbus on his first return to Lisbon. The Spanish carried it to North-West Africa in the sixteenth century, by way of the Canary Islands. There is also a story that the Moors, when they were finally expelled from Spain in 1610, took the "Indian fig" with them and planted it round their villages.

Almost every name Morocco gave it remembers that it came from somewhere else. In the Anti-Atlas it is aknari, a name often linked to the Canaries. In Moroccan Arabic it is kermus lhindi, the Indian fig, or simply el handia, because people believed it had come from India. It is also karmus nsara, the fig of the Christians.

The French called it figue de Barbarie, after Barbary, the old European name for the coast of the Maghreb. The Canaries, India, the Christians, Barbary. Mexico appears in none of them.

Hedge, fruit and fodder

Sbouya and Mesti lie in Aït Baâmrane, in Sidi Ifni province. My family is from the Souss, just to the north. For most of its history in Aït Baâmrane, the cactus stayed close to the house, in the family gardens for vegetables and fruit known as ourtis.

It had three jobs. It fenced fields and marked which land belonged to which family. Its fruit was picked and eaten. Its pads fed the animals: a hectare of cactus gives 10 to 30 tonnes of dry fodder. In a country where dry years are frequent, feeding livestock remains its main use today.

Two of the varieties have human names. Moussa grows mostly around Sbouya, and near the ocean its harvest can run into December. Aïssa belongs to Mesti and is picked from the same plant in June, July and August. The rare Achefri is very spiny and flowers in May.

The fruit of the region carries a protected geographical indication, Sobbar Aït Baâmrane, the kind of protection one usually associates with cheese and wine.

In the middle of the last century the cactus also found work with the state. After a soil conservation decree in 1951, a dedicated service began planting it against erosion.

It copes with drought because it breathes at night. It opens its pores when the air is cooler, which is why it can grow where only 100 to 150 millimetres of rain fall in a year.

All of this has long been known in Aït Baâmrane: which variety grows where, when it is picked, what the pad is for and what the fruit is for. That kind of knowledge, carried into modern hands, is where AZOURANE starts.

The cactus that brought the argan back

As people left, the fields changed. Between 1970 and 1994 barley fell from 80 to 35 per cent of the cultivated land, and the cactus moved into the space it left.

When researchers surveyed those plantations, they found something nobody had planted: young argan trees. The pattern was clear. The older the prickly pear orchard, the more young argan inside it.

The reason is practical. Herds do not graze among the cactus, so nothing eats the seedlings, and the soil beneath improves over the years. The Mexican immigrant ended up sheltering the tree south-western Morocco is known for. Nobody asked it to.

A relative worth its weight in silver

On Mexican prickly pears lives a tiny scale insect, the cochineal. One species, Dactylopius coccus, gave carmine, a red so prized that cochineal could be worth half its weight in silver, sometimes more. From 1674 Spain required every shipment to sail on, or under the protection of, its warships.

In recent decades Morocco planted cactus on a large scale. More than a hundred thousand hectares went under it, much of it through drought programmes, and over half in the region of Guelmim and Sidi Ifni. The Green Morocco Plan reached its cactus targets for 2020 six years early, in 2014.

That same year, the insect arrived.

It was the wild cousin of the carmine insect, Dactylopius opuntiae, first found in September 2014 near Khémis Zemamra, in Doukkala. It probably came from Spain, where it had been recorded in 2006 and 2013. It soon covered a radius of more than a hundred kilometres.

It can wipe out a young plantation in two or three months and an old one in about a year. Spraying only delays the losses. According to Morocco's Ministry of Agriculture, 39 million linear metres of cactus were destroyed between July 2016 and December 2023.

The strangest part is that Australia and South Africa once released this same insect on purpose, to kill cactus they considered invasive. In Mexico, home to more than 60 species of cactus, natural enemies keep it in check and no spraying is needed.

The answer came from Morocco's national cactus collection. Researchers screened hundreds of types and singled out eight varieties resistant to the insect: Karama, Ghalia, Belara, Marjana, Cherratia, Angad, Melk Zhar and Aakria. All eight are registered in the official catalogue.

More than 16.3 million resistant plants were produced between 2021 and 2025. In November 2025 the minister of agriculture announced that half of the 122,000-hectare target had been reached. The insect also thinned the fruit, and with it the seed for oil.

About a tonne of fruit for a kilo of oil

The fruit, the pads and the hedges are as old in Morocco as the plant itself. The seed oil is new. The industry belongs to this century, when firms and rural women's cooperatives began turning cactus into jam, vinegar, flour, silage and oil. Such cooperatives now work in Guelmim, Sidi Ifni, Aït Baha, Rhamna and Al Hoceima.

The Aknari cooperative was founded on 23 January 2001. It had about fifty members and made juice, jam, cactus-pad fillets, dried cactus fruit and flour. In Aït Baâmrane, oil is the main use for the seeds, for what it does on the skin.

The oil comes from small seeds that hold only about five per cent oil. Before pressing, a special machine separates the seeds from the pulp. The trade estimate is about thirty kilos of seed for a kilo of oil, and about a tonne of fruit to supply that seed. A hectare planted with a thousand cactus plants gives 10 to 15 tonnes of fruit a year.

How much oil a seed gives also depends on where it grew. When researchers cold-pressed seed from six Moroccan areas, seed from Tiznit gave five per cent oil, from Sidi Ifni 4.1 and from Aït Baha 2.7.

This is why prickly pear seed oil is one of the most expensive cosmetic oils on the market. By 2017 Morocco had at least twenty producers of cactus oil, and it is now a major supplier of the oil to European cosmetics.

What the oil does for the face

Prickly pear seed oil is mostly linoleic acid, an omega-6 fatty acid. In samples from six Moroccan areas it made up between 57 and 64 per cent.

Linoleic acid plays a direct part in maintaining the skin's barrier, the layer that keeps water in. Plant oils also leave a thin protective film on the skin, which helps it hold on to moisture.

The European register of cosmetic ingredients lists this oil as an emollient and skin-conditioning ingredient. An emollient softens and smooths the skin. On a label you will find it as Opuntia Ficus-Indica Seed Oil.

A pure prickly pear seed oil is coming to the AZOURANE range.

How much cream is enough

For everyday use, prickly pear seed oil is in AFOULKI, our face cream. It sits alongside argan oil, shea butter, rose water, glycerin and AQUAXYL. One pump is enough for the whole day, and the skin stays hydrated and soft to the touch.

Apply it to a clean face. Press the pump gently, just enough for a pea-sized amount, and spread it over the face. You will not need more.

If you also use argan oil with your cream, the order and the number of drops are in our guide to argan oil. Prickly pear seed oil is also in our face mask TIFAWT, for the day of the week when your face gets ten minutes more.

AQUAXYL: a sugar that helps skin keep its water

The AFOULKI label also carries three names that few people pronounce correctly at the first attempt: Xylitylglucoside, Anhydroxylitol and Xylitol. Together they are AQUAXYL, a complex made from two plant sugars: xylitol and glucose.

It works much like glycerin, which captures water molecules. Sugars such as xylitol help the skin hold on to water, and AQUAXYL is designed to support the skin's own reserve of moisture. In AFOULKI it sits beside glycerin: glycerin and AQUAXYL hold the water, while the oils and shea butter soften the skin.

Our face cleanser AMAAN, which returns this year, carries the same trio. The full AFOULKI formula, with its Latin names, is on our ingredients page.

Three pads on bare ground

In 2014 Sidi Ifni province started a festival for the prickly pear, the Moussem Aknari. The fifth edition, in August 2018, featured a tasting of cactus dishes and the election of a Miss Cactus.

Several names, some four centuries in Morocco and, in the end, a Miss Cactus of its own. Not bad for a plant you grow by laying three pads on bare ground and walking away.