Squalane

Squalane is a single hydrocarbon: thirty carbons, no oxygen, no double bonds. It is made by hydrogenating squalene, a compound the body produces on the way to cholesterol and secretes onto the skin in sebum.^[1]

Its appeal is what it lacks. With no double bonds it cannot go rancid; with no oxygen in the molecule it has almost no colour and almost no smell. It is an oil that does very little apart from sit on skin and feel light.

Squalene, the parent, is a triterpene of formula C30H50 carrying six double bonds. It occurs throughout the plant and animal kingdoms as an intermediate in the biosynthesis of cholesterol and of plant sterols.^[2]

Adding hydrogen across all six bonds gives C30H62: squalane, systematically 2,6,10,15,19,23-hexamethyltetracosane, and called perhydrosqualene in older literature.^[3] The saturated molecule is chemically inert in a way the parent is not, and that inertness is the entire point of the conversion.

Every route to squalane ends at that hydrogenation step, which is why this entry records its origin as synthetic rather than naming a feedstock. Shark liver, olive distillate and fermentation broth are sources of the parent; the molecule sold as squalane is manufactured, whichever of them it started from.

The parent was found in 1906 by Mitsumaru Tsujimoto, an oils and fats chemist at the Tokyo Industrial Testing Station, in the liver oil of the shark known in Japanese as kuroko-zame. He did not isolate the substance then, only characterise a bromine addition product. Ten years later he separated the hydrocarbon itself by fractional vacuum distillation and named it squalene, after Squalidae, the shark family. A chemist named Chapman reached the same compound independently, working on sharks taken off Portugal, and called it spinacene — a name that survives as an occasional pharmaceutical label rather than as the compound's usual one.^[4]

Squalane is twenty years younger than its parent. Heilbron, Hilditch and Kamm reported the hydrogenation of squalene in the presence of nickel in 1926, and the saturated hydrocarbon that reaction gives is the material this entry describes.^[5]

The cosmetic interest followed the finding, in the 1950s, that squalene is an important component of human sebum. It recast an industrial by-product as something the skin already makes.^[4]

Supply has since shifted. Deep-sea shark liver remains the richest natural source — in those species the unsaponifiable fraction of the liver runs from half to four-fifths, most of it squalene — and it held the market because it was cheaper to process than anything else, even after olive oil distillate emerged as the second industrial source. Pressure on the fishery and sharply reduced European quotas changed that. By the 2010s fermentation was being investigated as a third route, though the yields then reported were laboratory ones, and one of them was described as too low for commercial exploitation.^[4]

Squalane is an emollient and a light carrier. It spreads quickly, leaves little residue, and is fluid enough to thin a heavy base without making it greasy.^[6]

In colour cosmetics it is used in cream products and liquid foundations to disperse pigment and adjust slip, with the advantage that it will not develop an oxidised smell over a product's shelf life. It also serves as a solvent for oil-soluble actives.

Squalane is in current cosmetic use. It is tracked under CAS 111-01-3 and EC 203-825-6.^[7] It is not named in Annex II or Annex III of Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009, the European Union's lists of prohibited and restricted cosmetic substances, as of September 2026.^[8]

The live question about squalane is ecological rather than toxicological, and it concerns the source rather than the molecule. Squalane from shark liver, from olive distillate and from fermentation is the same substance, and all of it declares the single INCI name SQUALANE, so an ingredient list does not disclose which feedstock was used. Trade descriptions such as olive squalane and sugarcane squalane describe a supply chain rather than a material, and they are not identifiers a reader can look up.