Ranking skin care ingredients would be a close to impossible task, but if I tried really hard to do it, I reckon sea-buckhorn extract would be within my top five favourites. Not only do I add it liberally to moisturisers, I also keep some pure extract at hand in my kitchen to dab on rough skin patches after those little cooking accidents. And its healing power has not gone unnoticed: “My burn has gone! What was that you put on it earlier on?”

 Widespread along coastal areas of Europe and Asia, including Britain, sea-buckthorn  is a sun-loving shrub, tolerant of salt in the air and soil – a useful plant in stabilising mobile sand dunes. The ripen berries echo the colour of the sun. Soft, juicy and rich in oils, they are relished by birds, especially fieldfares and starlings migrating onto the coast in autumn.

The thorny branches do not relinquish their bounty easily. Harvesting is done by shaking the fruit off the shrubs, but only up to a quarter can be removed, the rest carry on brightening the landscape and feeding wildlife through the winter.

The fruit of the plant has a high nutritional value: fifteen times more vitamin C than oranges,  carotenoids, vitamin E, amino acids, dietary minerals, sterols and polyphenolic acids. It is used as  food (juices and jams), nutritional supplement and as a skin care ingredient.

I like to use sea-buckthorn pulp oil – rather than the seed oil – because it retains a wider range of the fruit’s nutrients: a high proportion of pro-vitamin A carotenoids (as much as 300 to 370 mg per 100g), vitamins E and K, sterols and wide variety of fatty acids.

The sea-buckthorn oil is known to promote wound healing and tissue regeneration and it’s used to treat burns, eczema and radiation injury. It is also taken internally in the treatment of stomach and intestinal diseases. There has been no reported evidence of sea-buckthorn oil causing  any adverse reactions.

Sea-buckthorn is a wonderful gift from nature, used for centuries by traditional medicine and whose benefits modern science has only just begun to explore.