Organic Copaiba Balsam Essential Oil

It is 100% pure copaiba balsam, with nothing added, nothing diluted, and GC/MS tested. But the second half of that question is the interesting one, and most sellers never answer it.

Copaiba is not a distilled essential oil. It is an oleoresin: a balsam that flows out of the trunk when the tree is tapped, rather like maple syrup. Ours is wild harvested in Brazil, then clarified by gentle warming and centrifuging, which cleans it without changing it. Our supplier's specification sheet, in the Documents tab, describes exactly that process.

It is sold in the essential oil aisle, and everybody including us calls it copaiba essential oil, because that is where people look for it. We would rather you knew what is actually in the bottle.

If you searched for balsam oil: copaiba balsam oil is one of several balsams, and they are not interchangeable. Peru balsam, tolu balsam and fir balsam are different trees with different chemistry, and Peru balsam in particular is a well known skin allergen. Copaiba is the mildest of the group, which is why it is the one most often chosen for skin blends.

This is the question serious copaiba buyers ask, and there are three answers on the market.

• Crude, raw or virgin balsam: straight from the tree, unfiltered. Thick, sticky, cloudy, full of plant debris and resin acids. Closest to what you would see tapped in the Amazon, and the hardest to work with.
• Clarified, which is ours: the same tapped balsam, gently warmed and centrifuged to take out the debris and water. Nothing is distilled off and nothing is added, so the composition is essentially the crude material minus the mess. Thinner and cleaner than crude.
• Rectified or distilled: steam distilled from the oleoresin to take only the volatile fraction. Much thinner, paler, and it leaves the heavy resin acids behind. A genuinely different material.

None of the three is fake and all three are sold as copaiba. The useful thing is knowing which you have, because they do not behave the same in a formulation, and the price is different. Ours is the clarified oleoresin, and it says so on the specification sheet on this page.

Because the clarified oleoresin is a good deal lighter than the raw balsam, and if you have seen copaiba tapped from a tree, this will not look like what you remember.

Raw copaiba straight from the trunk is thick, cloudy and sticky. Clarifying it, which is gentle warming and centrifuging, removes the water and debris that make it look like that. What is left is a clean, free-running liquid, yellow to light brown. That is the material behaving correctly, not a diluted or poor-quality oil.

It is a fair thing to be surprised by, and it is the one piece of information most copaiba listings leave out. If you specifically want the thick raw balsam, that is a different grade and we do not currently sell it. The specification sheet in the Documents tab states the expected appearance so you can check your bottle against it.

Very little, and that is the point of it.

Copaiba is mild, sweet and creamy-balsamic, soft and faintly woody, with almost none of the sharpness or resin bite you get from frankincense or myrrh. Our supplier describes it as “characteristic, mild sweet creamy balsamic”, which is about right. Most people find it warm and slightly peppery underneath, and considerably quieter than they expected.

If you are buying it hoping for a strong scent you will be disappointed, and one of our own reviewers said exactly that. What it is genuinely good at is smoothing: one drop takes the hard edge off a blend that is too sharp, without adding a smell of its own. In perfumery terms it is a fixative with very little character, which is a useful thing to own.

It is one of the gentlest materials in the range, and skin blends are the most common reason people buy it. Our supplier lists it for body balms, butters, lotions, oils, salves and serums, which is a fair summary of where it belongs.

• Face: 0.5 to 1%, which is two to three drops in 30ml of a light carrier such as jojoba or rosehip.
• Simple copaiba face serum: 3 drops of copaiba and 1 drop of lavender in 30ml of jojoba or rosehip, which is about 0.7%. Shake, apply 2 to 3 drops to damp skin at night.
• Body: 1 to 2% in a carrier oil.
• Beard and after-shave: 2 drops in 30ml of jojoba. Low odour and mild, which is what those blends need.
• Not for lips: the IFRA certificate marks copaiba Not approved for lip products, so leave it out of balms.

Mild is not the same as inert. The safety data sheet classifies copaiba as a skin sensitiser, so dilute it properly and patch test on the inner forearm for 24 hours like anything else. We make no claims about what it does to skin beyond being a gentle, low-odour addition to a blend.

Almost everything, which is its real talent. Copaiba is so quiet that it will not argue with anything you put it next to, and it is the oil to reach for when a blend is nearly right but too sharp.

The partners that work: lavender, frankincense, cedarwood, sandalwood, vetiver, bergamot, sweet orange, ylang ylang, rose, jasmine, patchouli, rose geranium and black pepper. As a base note it also works as a gentle fixative under the florals, holding rose and jasmine on the skin for longer.

Five copaiba blends

• Calm skin oil, 1% in 30ml: 4 copaiba, 2 lavender in jojoba.
• Quiet evening room: 4 copaiba, 2 frankincense, 2 cedarwood.
• Beard oil, 30ml jojoba: 3 copaiba, 2 cedarwood, 1 bergamot.
• The smoother: 1 drop of copaiba into any blend that is too sharp. That is the whole recipe.
• Warm and soft: 3 copaiba, 2 sweet orange, 1 vetiver.

Because copaiba is a base note with almost no scent of its own, you can use a lot more of it than you would of patchouli or vetiver without taking over the blend.

Beta-caryophyllene is a sesquiterpene found across the plant world, in black pepper, cloves, rosemary, hops and many others. Copaiba is one of the richest natural sources there is: our safety data sheet declares it at 20 to 50% of this material, which is far more than most plants carry.

It is also the reason copaiba gets talked about so much more than its smell would justify. The compound has attracted a lot of scientific interest, and a lot of marketing has been built on top of that interest, particularly by the large direct-sales brands.

We are going to stop there. Research interest is not the same as a proven effect in a bottle of oil, and we do not make health claims for copaiba or for beta-caryophyllene. What we can tell you is exactly how much of it is in the material, which is on the safety data sheet in the Documents tab, and leave the rest to you.

No. They are different compounds from different plants, and copaiba contains no CBD, no THC and nothing from the cannabis plant at all.

The comparison exists because beta-caryophyllene, the compound copaiba is rich in, is one that researchers have studied alongside cannabis compounds. That is a laboratory similarity, not a product similarity, and it has been stretched a long way by marketing.

Copaiba is a traditional Amazonian balsam, tapped from Copaifera trees and used in Brazil for centuries. It is legal everywhere, it is not a controlled substance, and it is sold here as an aromatherapy and cosmetic ingredient. If you are looking for CBD, this is not it.