Frankincense Resin vs. Frankincense Oil: Which One Actually Belongs in Your Skincare?

Search "frankincense skincare" and you'll find hundreds of products. Look closer at the ingredient lists, and you'll notice almost all of them use the same form: frankincense essential oil.

But frankincense doesn't naturally come as an oil. It comes as resin — sticky, golden droplets harvested from the bark of Boswellia trees. The essential oil is something humans extract from the resin, leaving most of the original compound behind.

For skincare, that distinction matters more than most people realize.

What frankincense actually is

Frankincense has been used for thousands of years — as incense, as medicine, as currency in some parts of the ancient world. It's harvested by cutting into the bark of Boswellia trees (mostly Boswellia sacra, carterii, and serrata, depending on the region) and letting the sap bleed out and harden into "tears" of resin.

The resin contains a complex mixture of compounds: boswellic acids, terpenes, gums, polysaccharides, and essential oil. When you steam-distill the resin to make essential oil, you capture the volatile aromatic molecules — but you leave behind the boswellic acids and the larger structural compounds that don't travel with steam.

Boswellic acids are the part of frankincense that researchers have spent decades studying for their effects on inflammation. They're also the part that essential oil largely doesn't contain.

In other words: frankincense essential oil smells like frankincense, but it's missing some of what makes frankincense interesting in the first place.

Why almost every brand uses oil anyway

Three reasons, mostly:

It's easier to formulate with. Oil mixes into creams and serums smoothly. Resin doesn't. To use resin in a topical product, you have to grind it into a fine powder and properly suspend it in a carrier — which takes more work and more skill.

It's easier to source. Essential oil is a stable, standardized commodity. Quality resin is harder to find, and grinding it well takes proper equipment.

It's cheaper to mass-produce. A few drops of essential oil per batch cost less than a properly milled, organic, food-grade resin powder.

This isn't necessarily a knock on essential oil — it has its own uses, and a lot of people genuinely enjoy it. But if you're picking a skincare product specifically because it contains frankincense, you should know which form you're getting.

What resin offers that oil doesn't

When ground into a fine powder and incorporated into a cream, frankincense resin delivers the full spectrum of the original material — including the boswellic acids that the essential oil leaves behind. It also provides a slow, sustained release as the cream sits on your skin, rather than the rapid evaporation you get from a volatile oil.

The aroma is also different. Resin smells deeper, woodier, and more grounded than the bright top-note version you get from essential oil. People who've used both tend to describe the resin version as "the real thing."

Why we made our face cream this way

When we developed our Frankincense + Tallow Daily Face Cream, we made a deliberate choice to use crushed organic resin powder rather than essential oil. It's the more difficult option from a manufacturing standpoint, and it's significantly more expensive per batch. But it's also the version that actually delivers what frankincense has been valued for over thousands of years.

We pair it with grass-fed tallow because the two work in a way that's almost too complementary to be a coincidence. Tallow gives your skin the fatty building blocks it recognizes. Resin contributes its own profile of compounds. The base is simple, the ingredient list is short, and there's nothing in there that doesn't need to be there.

How to tell what you're getting

Next time you're looking at a frankincense product, check the ingredient list:

• Boswellia carterii oil / Boswellia sacra oil / Frankincense essential oil → essential oil, not resin
• Boswellia carterii resin / Boswellia sacra resin / Frankincense resin powder → actual resin

Both are legitimate ingredients. They're just different ingredients. If a brand lists "frankincense" without specifying which form, it's almost always the oil — because if it were the resin, they'd want you to know.

Frankincense is one of the most storied ingredients in human history. If you're going to buy something for the name on the label, it's worth checking what's actually in the jar.