Squalane — The shark that isn’t in it

In 1906 a Japanese chemist named Mitsumaru Tsujimoto, working on oils and fats, isolated an unusual compound from deep-sea shark liver. He called it squalene, after Squalus, the shark genus it came out of. The name has held for a hundred and twenty years, which is awkward, because very little of what goes into skincare now comes from sharks at all.

Raw squalene had a problem. It oxidised — left in contact with air it turned, and quickly, which made it close to useless in anything expected to sit on a shelf. The fix was hydrogenation: saturating the molecule so there was nothing left for oxygen to attack. That produced squalane, with an a, and it is the only reason the ingredient exists commercially.

A stabilised version reached the market in the 1950s through the French chemist Sébastien Sabetay, sold under the name Cosbiol; the firm he formed with René Laserson in 1951 distributed it for decades.

For most of the century that followed, the source was still the shark. Deep-sea species carry it in volume in their livers, and the industry took a great deal of it.

Squalane occurs in olives, in rice bran, and in sugarcane fermented by engineered yeast. The plant and fermentation versions are chemically identical to the original — same molecule, no shark — and they are what any serious formulator now buys.

So: one compound, still named after an animal it no longer needs. Isolated in 1906. Stabilised in the 1950s. Re-sourced entirely within the last twenty years. Never relaunched, never given a better name, never presented as new.

It sits in the Overnight Recovery Cream, doing the job it has always done — putting back what the day took, without weight — and it comes from plants.

改善 — kaizen. The molecule was already right. What changed was how it gets made.