Camelina, the Gold of Pleasure: An Ancient Oil with Many Modern Talents

Some ingredients are made in a laboratory.

Others arrive with a history that stretches back thousands of years, and a name so good you couldn’t have made it up if you tried.

Camelina oil, sometimes delightfully called “Gold of Pleasure” oil, belongs firmly in the second category.

The name alone makes us smile. Gold of Pleasure sounds like something an alchemist might have invented, or a potion lifted from an old herbal book bound in cracked leather. But this little oil is very real, very golden, and has been quietly used across Northern Europe for centuries, for nourishment, for skin care, and for hair care.

These days, it has rather quietly become one of the workhorses of the Beauty and the Bees range. You’ll find it tucked inside our shampoo bars, our facial cleansing bar, our hand creams and our body creams, turning up wherever skin or hair needs that particular kind of lightweight, omega-rich nourishment that doesn’t sit heavily or shout for attention.

One little golden seed, woven through almost everything we make. Not a bad résumé.

What on earth is Camelina oil, anyway?

Camelina oil is pressed from the tiny seeds of the Camelina sativa plant, a hardy little flowering oilseed crop with rather unglamorous mustard and flax cousins.

It was cultivated across Northern Europe and parts of Asia for centuries, long before anyone had thought to invent the word “skincare”, where it earned its charming nickname because of the beautiful golden colour of the oil pressed from its seeds. (We suspect the people doing the pressing were the ones who came up with the name. We would have, too.)

The oil itself is naturally rich in omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, vitamin E, and a generous lineup of plant antioxidants. Which, in plain English, means it’s the kind of ingredient that helps support both the skin barrier and the appearance of healthier-looking hair, without weighing anything down.

That last part matters more than it sounds. A lot of nourishing oils are wonderful but heavy. They can leave hair limp, skin slick, or formulations sitting on the surface rather than absorbing in. Camelina is the unusual one. Properly nourishing, but surprisingly lightweight.

Which is why we keep reaching for it.

Why we keep coming back to it

Here’s the unflashy truth… Most of the ingredients we love don’t promise miracles. They just help create the right conditions.

Camelina sits firmly in that camp.

Because of its omega fatty acid profile, it helps support the natural barrier of both scalp and skin. That quiet, often-overlooked layer that does so much of the heavy lifting in keeping skin comfortable, calm and behaving itself. When that barrier feels well-supported, skin tends to look softer and feel less reactive, and hair tends to behave a little better too.

It also brings vitamin E and a rather impressive antioxidant profile to the table, both of which help defend skin and hair against the kind of environmental stress that comes with simply existing in the modern world. (Sun, pollution, central heating, the lot.)

And it’s lightweight. Which means it can condition hair without leaving it greasy or limp, and help replenish skin without that slippery, smothered feeling that some richer oils leave behind.

For fine, fragile hair (exactly the type our Bee Renewed Hair and Scalp Revival Shampoo Bar was created for) that balance is incredibly useful. For sensitive or barrier-stressed skin, even more so.

Grown right here, on Australian soil

One of the things we love most about Camelina is where ours comes from.

The Camelina oil we use is grown and produced by Waltanna Farms, based in Hamilton in the beautiful South-West Victorian farming region. This part of Victoria sits on the fertile basalt plains at the foothills of the Grampians, an area known for its clean environment, rich agricultural soil, and the kind of careful, deliberate farming we wish was a little more standard than it is.

For us, this matters. We’ve always preferred ingredients with a story you can actually trace, like the Stephens family beekeepers in Tasmania’s western rainforests, the Ashbolt Farm olive groves in the Coal River Valley, the Tas-Saff growers in the Huon. Knowing where things come from, and knowing the people who grow them, is part of how we make decisions about what goes into our range.

Camelina fits beautifully into that picture. An ancient European seed, now cultivated by Australian farmers on some of the country’s loveliest farmland, then quietly stirred into formulations made by hand in our little factory in Glenorchy, Tasmania.

It’s a small piece of the supply chain. But it’s a meaningful one.

One golden seed, several different jobs

Here’s where Camelina becomes genuinely interesting. Most ingredients are good at one thing. Camelina is good at quite a few, which is why it turns up in such different corners of our range.

In our hair range, it lives inside our Bee Renewed Hair and Scalp Revival Shampoo Bar, alongside moringa oil, amla, hydrolysed rice protein, Ayurvedic bakuchi and a carefully chosen blend of strengthening botanicals. There, Camelina’s lightweight conditioning helps support softness, smoothness and the appearance of stronger, more resilient hair, without weighing fine hair down. (If you’d like the deeper dive on why a healthy scalp is the foundation of healthier-looking hair, we’ve written about that in our Moringa Oil post.)

On the face, it shows up in our Bioactive Golden Superfood Facial Cleansing Bar, sitting alongside shea butter, beeswax, calendula, chamomile, oats, raw honey and lactobacillus ferment. Here, Camelina’s job is to nourish without heaviness, helping replenish the skin as the bar cleanses, so your face never gets that tight, stripped feeling that so many cleansers leave behind. Quietly impressive work for such a small ingredient.

For hands, it’s a key part of our Leatherwood Honey & Herb Luxe Hand Creams, across all three variants (Honeyed Cumquat, Honeyed Rose and Pure & Bare). Paired with Leatherwood honey, beeswax and barrier-supporting waxes, Camelina helps these creams do what most hand creams don’t quite manage: stay on your hands long enough to actually make a difference, especially through frequent washing and the realities of everyday life.

And for the rest of you, it’s tucked inside our Leatherwood Honey & Herb Silken Body Creams (in those same three scent variants), where it helps replenish dry, depleted skin alongside rice bran, olive and grape seed oils, without that heavy, sticky finish so many body creams leave behind.

One ingredient. Four corners of the range. All quietly doing the same essential job: nourishing without overwhelming.

Ancient European seed, Australian farmland, Tasmanian making

We love it when ingredients bring together different worlds.

Camelina is a perfect example. A plant once grown across the fields of Northern Europe, harvested for everything from cooking oil to old-world skin remedies. Now cultivated on the rich, basalt-fed farmland of South-West Victoria. And then folded by hand, in small batches, into shampoo bars and creams and cleansers made in Tasmania.

Ancient plant knowledge, Australian agriculture, and Tasmanian craft, all working together in a single golden oil.

For a small Tasmanian business built on the idea of Buy Better, Buy Less, that’s exactly the kind of ingredient we want to keep returning to. Honest. Traceable. Quietly multi-talented. Good at what it does, without needing to make a noise about it.

A final thought

The most interesting ingredients in our range aren’t usually the loud ones. They’re the quietly dependable ones, chosen because of what they actually do, not because they’re trending on social media this month.

Camelina is a perfect example. A tiny golden seed with thousands of years of human history behind it, grown by Australian farmers we know by name, and woven through the products we make for hair, hands, face and body.

Which feels like a rather lovely story for one little plant.

And it’s exactly the kind of ingredient story we love telling.

Explore our range containing Camelina Oil