For decades, if not centuries, the Amazon dwellers of southern Colombia didn\u2019t make too much of the cacay nut. They fed it to their livestock, used it to treat wounds and chopped down its trees for firewood.<\/p>\n
But then, a few years ago, the global jet-setting crowd found out what the yellow-ish oil from the protein-rich nut could do for their skin. And suddenly, the cacay (pronounced kahk-ai) has become a red-hot commodity, providing the key ingredient to anti-aging facial creams that can fetch $200 an ounce in beauty shops in Los Angeles and London.<\/p>\n
While most of the nuts come from wild trees in remote areas, new plantations are popping up in impoverished parts of Colombia that were better known for cocaine and anti-government rebel groups. Vitaliano Ordonez, a farmer who used to give the nuts to his cows, sold eight of the animals to buy 120 saplings. Because only a few are mature enough to produce this year, he\u2019s scavenging every kernel from two old trees on his small dairy farm in Puerto Rico, Colombia, 300 kilometers (190 miles) southeast of Bogota.<\/p>\n
\u201cI won\u2019t let even one nut go to waste,\u201d said Ordonez, 70. Each apple-sized nut pod contains three seeds, each bigger than an almond. He expects to collect about 60 kilograms (133 pounds) of cacay kernels this year. That may generate as much as 300,000 pesos ($198), or the equivalent of almost half the country\u2019s minimum monthly wage.<\/p>\n
The boom is in part the work of Alberto Jaramillo. While scientists have highlighted the nut\u2019s virtues for more than a decade, it was Jaramillo, the head of Bogota-based Kahai SAS, who found a market for the oil after attending trade shows and hiring a trial study of the oil\u2019s use in skincare. Kahai, which buys nuts from growers and scavengers, including Ordonez, expects to double sales this year.<\/p>\n
Sales of face oils are rising, sparking new products from cosmetics-maker L\u2019Oreal SA and Procter & Gamble Co.\u2019s Olay brand made of everything from grape and apricot seeds to lavender and marjoram. Beauty-oil sales at retailer Sephora SA tripled in three years.<\/p>\n
In the U.S., where high-end facial skincare sales have largely been flat over the past year, face-oil sales surged 24 percent to $42 million, data from NPD Group show. They\u2019ve more than doubled over the past two years.<\/p>\n
The small but growing appeal of cacay in the $465 billion personal-care market has been fueled by the increased popularity of Morocco\u2019s argan oil, which got picked up by hair-care makers such as L\u2019Or\u00e9al and Unilever NV, and is now included in 14 percent of new hair treatments, according to market research from Mintel. Cacay contains key ingredients in anti-aging products, including antioxidants and retinoids, according to Kahai.<\/p>\n
Source: Bloomberg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For decades, if not centuries, the Amazon dwellers of southern Colombia didn\u2019t make too much of the cacay nut. They fed it to their livestock, used it to treat wounds and chopped down its trees for firewood. But then, a few years ago, the global jet-setting crowd found out what the yellow-ish oil from the … Continue reading “Rare nut all the rage in face-oil boom”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2961,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,123],"tags":[11502,11500,11499,11501],"class_list":["post-18499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-world","tag-anti-aging-facial-creams","tag-beauty","tag-cacay-nut","tag-face-oil"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18499"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18500,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18499\/revisions\/18500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}