Is Frankincense Oil Good for Your Skin? The Research Behind the Claims

In short: frankincense oil for skin is one of the most confidently marketed ingredients in natural beauty, and most of what is claimed for it comes from research on a different form of the plant. This article explains what frankincense is, how the resin, the extract and the essential oil differ, which claims the research actually supports, and why we use frankincense essential oil anyway. If you have ever wondered whether the label you are holding is telling you the truth, this is the piece that lets you check.

Frankincense oil for skin is everywhere right now, and it nearly always arrives with a paragraph about inflammation attached. That paragraph is why this article exists, because the research it points at is real, well conducted, and about a material that is not in the bottle.

Here is the whole thing in one line: the compounds behind the research live in frankincense resin, and they cannot survive being distilled into an oil. Everything below is the long version, including why we still use it.

What Is Frankincense, and Why Is It Also Called Olibanum?

Frankincense is dried tree sap, and its old trade name is olibanum, which is still what you will see on some technical paperwork.

Frankincense is dried tree sap. Somebody cuts the bark of a Boswellia tree, the tree bleeds a milky resin to seal the wound, and a few weeks later that resin has hardened into golden lumps that get collected by hand.

The trees grow in dry, rocky country across the Horn of Africa, southern Arabia and India. They are not farmed in any conventional sense. They grow where they grow, out of bare rock, and harvesters walk to them. Cutting the bark is called tapping, and the hardened resin is called a tear.

Boswellia and frankincense are not two different things, which trips people up constantly. Boswellia is the tree. Frankincense is what comes out of it. The confusion is worth clearing up because supplements sold as Boswellia are made from the resin, while skincare sold as frankincense is usually made from the oil, and those are very different materials.

How Long Has Frankincense Been Used for Skin Care?

Frankincense has been used for thousands of years, and it has one of the longest documented histories of any material people put on their bodies. Burned in Egyptian temples, used in embalming, traded along the incense routes in quantities that built cities, and at points valued by weight against gold. It appears in Exodus as an ingredient in the holy incense and in Matthew as one of the three gifts.

It runs through traditional medicine in several places at once: Ayurvedic and Indian medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, and the folk practice of the Arabian peninsula. Somali harvesters have chewed the frereana grade for generations, which is why it is known there as Maydi, the king of frankincense.

People did not keep doing all of that for five thousand years by accident. We think the history is genuinely interesting and worth telling. We also think history is not evidence of what a moisturizer does to your face, and the two get blurred together constantly in this category.

Why Are Frankincense and Myrrh Always Mentioned Together?

Because they grew and travelled together. Myrrh comes from Commiphora trees rather than Boswellia, but they share the same dry country across the Horn of Africa and southern Arabia, and they moved along the same incense routes to the same buyers. Both were worth serious money, which is why frankincense and myrrh turn up side by side in temple inventories, in Egyptian tombs and in the gospel account of the magi.

They smell quite different. Frankincense is brighter and more resinous. Myrrh is darker, bitter, almost medicinal, and it lingers far longer. Perfumers still pair them because the myrrh gives the frankincense a base to sit on.

We use frankincense on its own. Myrrh is a heavier note than we want in something you put on your face in the morning.

What Does Frankincense Smell Like?

Warm, dry and resinous, with a citrus edge and something faintly peppery behind it. Not sweet, not floral. If you have been in an old church or a temple, you already know it, because that is what has been burning.

The specifics shift a great deal by species, which is why "smells like frankincense" is not much of a description on its own. Some grades read heavy and balsamic. Others read bright and almost pine-like, closer to a cold morning in a forest than to incense smoke. Ours is at the fresher end: woody and a little spicy with a faint lemon note, and a coolness to it that comes from the camphorous side of the profile.

Burning the resin and distilling it into an oil also give you two different smells. Smoke brings out the sweet, heavy, church-adjacent character. The distilled oil is lighter and sharper, because you are only getting the part that evaporates.

What Is the Difference Between Frankincense Resin, Extract and Oil?

This is the section that explains most of the confusion around frankincense oil benefits, and almost nobody selling it makes the distinction.

The resin is the raw hardened sap. It contains a family of compounds called boswellic acids, and it is what supplement manufacturers start from.

A resin extract pulls a broad range of compounds out of the resin using solvent or carbon dioxide. Standardised extracts of this kind can run up to 60% boswellic acids, and this is the material almost all of the published research was conducted on.

The essential oil is made by distillation, which works by turning things into vapour and catching them again as they cool. Only the volatile fraction makes that journey. That fraction is what you can smell.

Boswellic acids have a molecular weight of about 470 and boiling points somewhere between 500 and 600 degrees Celsius. The heaviest molecule you would normally find in any distilled oil sits around 300. They do not turn to vapour, so they stay in the pot. Analyses of distilled frankincense oils generally find none of them at all.

What Are the Claimed Benefits of Frankincense for Skin?

Read a few labels and the list is consistent. Anti-aging properties. Reduced appearance of fine lines and wrinkles. Improved appearance of scars and blemishes. Firmer, tighter skin. Sometimes collagen support, sometimes a natural astringent effect, sometimes scar reduction stated outright.

Those claims are not invented from nothing. They trace back to a real body of work on boswellic acid and on how frankincense preparations behave in laboratory models of inflammation and tissue remodeling in human skin. Some of the more cited studies used pre-inflamed human dermal fibroblasts, which is a cell-culture model rather than a person, and looked at markers associated with skin aging and skin damage.

The problem is the leap from that work to a bottle. Those studies were run on the resin or on concentrated extracts of it. Almost none were run on a distilled essential oil, and none that we know of on the species we buy. So the compounds found in frankincense that drive the research are, in the main, not the compounds found in frankincense oil.

Is Frankincense Anti-Inflammatory?

The resin, and extracts made from it, have a serious body of research behind them on exactly that question.

The oil is a different material, and the honest position is not that it was tested and failed. It is that it was never the thing being tested. When you read a frankincense skincare label citing inflammation research, that citation belongs to a substance the product does not contain.

There is a small amount of preliminary laboratory work on frankincense oils and skin cells. It is cell-culture work rather than clinical trials, it has not been done on the species we buy, and it is nowhere near the standard that would let anyone put a benefit on a label. We are not going to build a product story on it.

You will also see a widely shared study about a frankincense compound called incensole acetate and its effects on the brain. Worth knowing what it actually was: a purified compound, given to mice, measuring activity in brain tissue. Nobody in that study was smelling anything and nobody in it was human.

Which Frankincense Essential Oil Do We Use?

Our frankincense is Boswellia frereana, wild grown in Somalia and hydrodistilled from the resin. It is certified organic under the USDA National Organic Program, certified by Oregon Tilth. On the label it reads as its INCI name, Boswellia Frereana (Frankincense) Resin Oil.

By composition it runs alpha-thujene at 20 to 60%, alpha-pinene under 50%, para-cymene at 5 to 20% and sabinene at 3 to 11%. It carries no boswellic acids, which is the point of everything above. It is not a genetically modified product and it has not been tested on animals.

Two more things worth knowing, because they almost never make it onto a label. The material carries limonene and linalool, which are the two constituents the EU requires to be declared as fragrance allergens, and they are naturally occurring in the plant rather than added. And under the current IFRA standards, frereana carries no restriction for leave-on facial products at the concentrations anyone would realistically use. Some aromatic materials do carry limits that tight. This one does not, and that mattered to us when we chose it.

It is not cheap, and premium frankincense never is. Almost none of the harvest is mechanised: the trees grow wild in hard country, someone walks to them, taps them by hand, waits weeks and returns for a small quantity of resin. Boswellia populations are also under real pressure from overharvesting, and several species now carry conservation assessments. Cheap frankincense is worth a second look, because the economics of doing it properly do not produce cheap frankincense.

We chose frereana over the other traded species deliberately. Boswellia sacra from Oman and Boswellia carterii from Somaliland are the pinene-led types you meet most often. Boswellia serrata from India is the species behind most of the supplement trade, and it is the one we started with before we changed our minds. Frereana is the grade Somali harvesters have always kept for themselves.

So Why Use It at All?

Because we love how it smells, and because we can tell you exactly what it is.

That is a smaller answer than the ones on most frankincense balm labels, and we think it is the more useful one. It is a clean scent. Woody and a little spicy with a faint lemon edge, fresh rather than heavy, and nothing like the sweet resinous cloud people expect when they hear the word. It settles under the tallow and honey rather than announcing itself, and it fades within a few minutes of going on.

It is in The Alamo, which is our whipped tallow and honey body butter with a scent to it. Blanco is the same base with nothing added for scent at all, for anyone who would rather have neither.

The alternative to a named botanical is the word "fragrance" on a label, which can cover dozens of undisclosed compounds. We would rather give you a species, an origin, an extraction method and a certificate, and let the smell be the reason.

Why Use Frankincense in a Balm Rather Than as an Oil?

A fat carries a scent differently from the way alcohol does. In a perfume the aromatic notes lift off you and travel. In a balm they sit close, hold quietly for a few minutes and go, which for something you put on your face at seven in the morning is usually the better effect.

There is a practical reason too. Aromatic oils should not go on skin neat, and a fat is a good carrier because it is already doing its own job. The tallow is not there to dilute the frankincense; the frankincense is a small addition to something that was already the product. The vitamin E that keeps the tallow from oxidising protects the frankincense at the same time, which matters because oxidised aromatic oils are more likely to irritate skin than fresh ones.

Can You Put Frankincense Oil Directly on Your Skin?

You should not, and this is the practical advice worth taking from this article.

Undiluted aromatic oils are a common route to irritation and to sensitisation, which is the kind of reaction that can stay with you for good. Dilute frankincense oil into a carrier before it goes anywhere near your face, and use less than you think. If you are using a finished balm, that has been done for you already.

Patch-test on the inside of your forearm and give it a full day before going further. That goes for anything new, and it goes double for anything aromatic.

Frankincense Oil for Face: What to Look For

Four things, and most bottles fail at least one. A species on the label, because the traded species are genuinely different materials. An extraction method, because that decides whether the boswellic acid research applies at all. A country of origin, because a supplier who cannot tell you where a wild-harvested resin came from bought it through several hands. And claims that match the material: if a bottle of distilled oil is selling you inflammation research, whoever wrote that label either did not check or is counting on you not to.

Which Skin Types Is Frankincense Oil Suitable For?

Most skin types tolerate it well at the concentrations used in finished skin care products. It is not a strong irritant and it has no reputation for clogging pores. The people who should be careful are the ones who should be careful with every aromatic material: anyone with reactive skin, anyone who has had a reaction to a scented product before, and anyone using it on broken or freshly shaved skin.

If your skin has been objecting to things, start with a fragrance-free product instead and see how you do with nothing added. Fragrance is the first thing dermatologists point at when skin reacts, and botanical origin does not exempt an ingredient from that. Natural is not a synonym for gentle.

If you are blending your own rather than buying a finished balm, dilute properly. Add a few drops to a carrier rather than working the other way around, keep face concentrations lower than body concentrations, and apply topically only after a patch test on the inside of your forearm that you have left for a full day.

The Short Version

• Frankincense is tree resin, tapped by hand from wild Boswellia trees. Its trade name is olibanum.
• The format decides everything. The resin and its extracts contain boswellic acids. Distilled essential oil does not, because those compounds are far too heavy to carry over in distillation.
• The benefits of frankincense you read on labels mostly trace to research on the resin or on concentrated extracts, often in cell-culture models. That work is real, and it is not about the oil in the bottle.
• Species matters. Boswellia sacra, carterii, serrata and frereana are genuinely different materials. A label that just says frankincense has told you nothing.
• Ours is Boswellia frereana, wild grown in Somalia, hydrodistilled from the resin, and certified organic under the USDA National Organic Program by Oregon Tilth.
• We use it for the smell. Woody and a little spicy with a faint lemon edge. We make no claim about what it does to skin, because we cannot substantiate one.
• Never apply it neat. Dilute into a carrier, keep face concentrations low, and patch test.
• It is in The Alamo, our whipped tallow and honey body butter. Blanco is the same base with nothing added for scent.