Most botanical oils are pulled out of the plant using either heat (which damages them) or chemical solvents like hexane (which leave residues). There is a third way — and it is how our Berry Oil and Seed Oil are made.
Supercritical CO₂ extraction is one of the cleanest oil-extraction techniques known to modern food and pharmaceutical science. It uses ordinary carbon dioxide — the same gas you exhale — as a solvent, but under a specific combination of temperature and pressure where it behaves as neither a liquid nor a gas. Chemists call this state 'supercritical'.
This is the same technique used to decaffeinate the highest-grade coffee beans, and one of the food-safe methods used across specialty botanical extraction. For a delicate oil like sea buckthorn — whose vitamin E, Omega-7 and carotenoids are all heat-sensitive — it is the method that preserves the most of what nature made.
It is also, unsurprisingly, one of the most expensive. But we believe an oil this rare deserves an extraction this careful.