Jojoba oil for men's face, and why it is a liquid wax

No. It is pressed from the seed of a desert shrub native to Arizona, California and north-western Mexico, and it pours like an oil. Chemically it is a wax that happens to be liquid at room temperature: almost entirely wax esters.

A wax ester is one fatty acid joined to one fatty alcohol. In jojoba both halves are long, mostly 20 and 22 carbons, each with a single double bond. Olive, sunflower and almond oil are triglycerides instead: three fatty acids hung on a glycerol backbone. Different molecule, different behaviour: jojoba spreads thin, feels light, and holds up against air better than safflower, canola or almond oil.

Nothing about that is for men in particular. Skin is skin. What makes it the right base for a man who doesn't do routines is the feel: a thin film, no shine at the right dose, and a bottle that keeps for months.

Partly. Sebum, the oil your skin makes for itself, is a mixture. In the standard account (Picardo and colleagues, 2009), more than half of it is triglycerides and free fatty acids, about a quarter is wax esters, and about an eighth is squalene. Wax esters are the piece peculiar to sebum: the body makes them almost nowhere else.

Jojoba is almost nothing but wax esters. So the honest sentence is this one: jojoba shares one class of molecule with sebum; it is not sebum, and it is not a copy of it. Pages that say jojoba "mimics" or "is identical to" your skin's oil are rounding a quarter up to a whole.

Yes. Many people use it neat. The rules are those of any face oil: a few drops, not a palmful; pressed into clean skin while it is still damp; and a patch test first, a drop on the inner arm for a few days. It is a leave-on oil, so there is nothing to rinse off at night.

The detail is on the guide: how many drops, and when, including after shaving and under a beard.

By colour, mostly. Cold-pressed jojoba, often sold as golden or virgin, is a clear golden liquid with a slight nutty smell. Refined jojoba has been filtered and bleached until it is colourless and smells of nothing. Refining also takes out some of the tocopherols the seed comes with, its own vitamin E, which leaves refined jojoba less resistant to oxidising.

Refined is not a fault; it is what you buy for no colour and no smell. The fault is a bottle that won't say which it is.

Ours: the grade is not on file yet. Until the certificates of analysis arrive, we won't print "cold-pressed" or anything like it. What we can say: the formula carries its own 0.5% tocopherol blend, vitamin E in sunflower oil, to slow the oils oxidising in the bottle.

• Too much looks greasy, the fear of every man we asked: "shiny as hell, like glistening all day." If your face still shines a few minutes later, use fewer drops next time.
• It adds no water. Pressed into damp skin, it slows the water already there from leaving; on dry skin it has less to keep.
• Not every face takes to it. As one German forum answer put it, "nicht jede Haut nimmt es gleichermaßen gut auf." Patch-test it, and stop if the skin is irritated.
• Pure jojoba turns cloudy or solid below about 10 °C, in a cold bathroom or a winter letterbox. It clears again as it warms.
• It has no SPF. Nothing in a face oil replaces sunscreen.
• It costs more than a kitchen oil: about €9 for 30 ml of pure jojoba from a German brand, less by the 100 ml.

It is a very good wax. That is the entire claim.

Eventually, but slowly. Triglyceride oils go stale as air gets at their fatty acids. Jojoba has very few triglycerides, and its wax esters oxidise slowly, which is why it keeps better than most plant oils. When an oil turns, it smells sharp and stale, a little like old crayons. If it smells off, it is off.

Our bottle carries the open-jar symbol with 9M: use it within nine months of opening. There is no water in the formula, so no preservative system is needed, and the amber glass keeps the light out. Keep it capped and off the windowsill. A bottle lasts about three months at three drops twice a day, a little less at four, so it runs out long before it runs down.

A percentage on a label is honest about exactly one thing: quantity. 82.5% tells you how much of this bottle is jojoba. It does not tell you the jojoba is good, where it grew, how it was pressed, or what the other 17.5% is doing.

Because a face oil should mostly be its base, and jojoba is the light, stable one. Everything else is there to do something jojoba does not.

• 15% rosehip seed oil, richer in linoleic and linolenic acid, which keeps less well on its own, so it sits inside a base that does.
• 2% essential oils, for the scent: sandalwood, lavender, frankincense, cedar and tea tree.
• 0.5% tocopherol blend: vitamin E in sunflower oil, minding the formula.

Why mix at all, rather than sell you pure jojoba? That is the whole argument of jojoba or rosehip. The short version: if pure jojoba suits you, buy it. Ours is €29.99 for 30 ml because it is a finished face oil, nine ingredients mixed and filled by hand by Jon Gore in Berlin, batch by numbered batch.

Two words this sheet declines to use. The convention is the target; no brand is named, and none needs to be.

Sources

1. Picardo M, Ottaviani M, Camera E, Mastrofrancesco A. Sebaceous gland lipids. Dermato-Endocrinology 1(2):68-71, 2009 (the composition of sebum).
2. Gad HA et al. Jojoba Oil: An Updated Comprehensive Review on Chemistry, Pharmaceutical Uses, and Toxicity. Polymers 13(11):1711, 2021 (wax-ester chemistry, refining).
3. Wikipedia: Jojoba oil (composition, colour, melting point, stability).
4. Wikipedia: Wax ester.
5. Wikipedia: Period-after-opening symbol.