Cold-Pressed Coconut Hair Oil

Details

Virgin coconut oil, cold pressed, filtered, bottled. That is the whole ingredient list: Cocos Nucifera Oil, 100 percent. Cold-pressed is one of the few method words worth keeping on a label, because it is a defined process with a measurable result, and the result is what is printed here. Pressing without heat leaves the free fatty acid low and the peroxide value low; refining, bleaching and deodorising, which is what RBD coconut oil goes through, strips the aroma, drops the unsaponifiable matter and produces an oil that is chemically fine and no longer virgin. Ours reads FFA 0.12 percent as lauric acid, peroxide value 0.8 milliequivalents of oxygen per kg, moisture 0.06 percent and unsaponifiable matter 0.52 percent, and it smells of coconut, which refined oil does not. The two cheats behind those numbers are worth naming. The first is solvent extraction: the oil is taken out with hexane, then sold as cold-pressed, and the tell is a hexane residue, so every lot is screened by headspace GC. The second is dilution, usually with light liquid paraffin, and that is what the MOSH and MOAH screen is for. The full fatty acid profile is printed below because it is the other way a blend shows up.

• Ingredient list, complete: Cocos Nucifera Oil, 100 percent. No fragrance, no colour, no preservative, no antioxidant, no second oil
• Free fatty acid 0.12 percent as lauric acid, peroxide value 0.8 meq oxygen per kg, moisture 0.06 percent, unsaponifiable matter 0.52 percent, all tested per lot
• Solvent residue: hexane not detected by headspace GC, which is what separates a pressed oil from an extracted one sold under the same word
• Mineral oil: MOSH and MOAH below the limit of quantification by LC-GC-FID. Liquid paraffin is the standard filler in Indian hair oil and it is invisible to the eye and the nose
• Fatty acid profile by GC: lauric 48.2, myristic 18.5, palmitic 8.7, caprylic 7.1, oleic 6.2, capric 5.9, stearic 2.8, linoleic 1.6 percent. Iodine value 7.5
• There is no added tocopherol and it does not need one. Coconut oil is about 91 percent saturated, which is why a single-ingredient line is possible here and would not be possible for a sunflower or a sesame oil
• What it actually does: coconut is the oil with published evidence of moving into the hair shaft and reducing protein loss during washing. That is why it is sold here as a pre-wash oil, and it is the only claim made for it. It does not regrow hair
• Tested fill: 200 ml net, filled by weight to 184 g at a measured density of 0.920 g per ml. The 500 ml is 460 g, checked per lot
• Amber glass bottle, because light is what ages an oil with no antioxidant in it
• Released as a cosmetic hair oil under the Cosmetics Rules 2020. It is not packed or released as an edible oil, and a cosmetic release is not a food release, so the two are not interchangeable
• Honest trade-off: it sets solid below about 24 C. That is coconut oil behaving normally and not a defect. Stand the bottle in warm water for a few minutes
• Second trade-off: some scalps do not get on with coconut oil left in overnight, particularly acne-prone or flake-prone ones. Thirty minutes before a wash is what it is for