What Is Palm Oil? Why It's in Your Skincare and Why We Refused It
Most people have never consciously bought palm oil. Almost everyone uses it every single day.
It is in roughly half of all packaged supermarket products. It is in your margarine, your chocolate, your shampoo, your cleaning products, and almost certainly your skincare. It hides under more than two hundred different ingredient names on labels, which means even people trying to avoid it often can't find it.
So what actually is it?
Palm oil is a vegetable oil extracted from the fruit of the oil palm tree, which grows almost exclusively in tropical rainforest regions, primarily Indonesia and Malaysia. It is cheap to produce, versatile, and has a long shelf life. For manufacturers, it is close to perfect.
For everything else, the story is considerably more complicated.
Why the Skincare Industry Uses Palm Oil
Palm oil and its derivatives are deeply embedded in cosmetics and skincare for practical reasons. It acts as an emollient, a lathering agent, a preservative, and a texture stabiliser. It makes creams creamier, soaps soapier, and products shelf-stable for longer.
It is also extraordinarily cheap. And in an industry built on maximising margins while marketing premium positioning, cheap ingredients with useful properties are very attractive.
The result is that palm oil or its derivatives appear in the vast majority of commercial skincare products, including many that market themselves as natural, ethical, or sustainable.
The Problem with Palm Oil
The demand for palm oil is one of the leading drivers of tropical deforestation on the planet.
To grow oil palms at the scale the global market demands, rainforest is cleared. The biodiversity of these forests is staggering. Orangutans, Sumatran tigers, pygmy elephants, and thousands of plant species exist nowhere else on earth. As the forest goes, so do they.
Beyond wildlife, palm oil production has a documented history of land rights abuses, displacement of indigenous communities, and exploitative labour practices in some of the world's most vulnerable regions.
The carbon cost is also significant. Tropical rainforests are among the most important carbon sinks on the planet. When they are cleared, that carbon is released. Palm oil production has contributed to emissions at a scale that makes it a genuine climate issue, not just a biodiversity one.
But What About Sustainable Palm Oil?
This is where it gets complicated, and where a lot of brands rely on consumer confusion to feel better about their choices.
The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, known as the RSPO, is the main certification body for sustainable palm oil. It certifies producers who meet certain environmental and social standards. Many brands use RSPO-certified palm oil and market this as an ethical choice.
The reality is more contested. Critics of the RSPO, including many environmental organisations, argue that the certification does not go far enough. That sustainable deforestation is still deforestation. That the standards are inconsistently enforced. That the system primarily exists to allow continued consumption with reduced guilt rather than to meaningfully protect forests.
There is a reasonable argument that sustainable palm oil is better than uncertified palm oil. There is also a reasonable argument that the only genuinely ethical position is to not use it at all.
Tree Fairy made the second choice.
Why Tree Fairy Uses No Palm Oil at All
We don't use palm oil. Not certified sustainable palm oil. Not derivatives hidden under other names. Not any of it.
This was not the easy choice. Palm oil derivatives are genuinely useful in skincare formulation and replacing them requires more work, more cost, and more complexity. There are ingredients we simply cannot use because clean alternatives don't exist at the quality we need.
We made that choice anyway. Because we don't think less bad is good enough when the stakes are tropical rainforests, endangered species, and communities whose land and livelihoods depend on those forests remaining intact.
We also think consumers deserve to know what is in their products and what it costs the world to put it there. The two hundred ingredient name problem is not an accident. Complexity serves the industry, not the people buying the products.
So we keep it simple. No palm oil. No derivatives. No exceptions. And we tell you that plainly, because you have the right to know.
How to Check If Your Skincare Contains Palm Oil
If you want to audit your current products, look for these common palm oil derivatives on ingredient lists:
- Sodium Lauryl Sulphate (SLS) and Sodium Laureth Sulphate (SLES)
- Cetyl alcohol, stearyl alcohol, cetearyl alcohol
- Glyceryl stearate
- Stearic acid, palmitic acid
- Sodium palm kernelate
- Anything with the words palm, palmit, or stear in it
This is not an exhaustive list. There are over two hundred derivatives and many have names that give no clue to their origin. If a brand is genuinely palm oil free, they will usually say so clearly. If they are quiet about it, it is worth asking.
No beauty standards. No self-proclaimed influencers. No gender roles. Just healthy skin. And healthy skin is your best skin.
