Argan oil: where it actually comes from

Argan trees (Argania spinosa) grow wild in meaningful numbers almost nowhere else on earth, concentrated in the Souss valley and the region between Essaouira and Agadir in Morocco's southwest. UNESCO designated the argan forest a Biosphere Reserve in 1998, largely to protect the tree from overharvesting as demand for the oil grew internationally.

The goats-in-trees photos are real, goats in this region genuinely do climb argan trees to eat the fruit, but the ones staged at roadside stops for tourist buses, goats tethered up in a tree for tips, are a performance, not how most oil actually gets made. A related, persistent myth is that traditional oil comes from pits a goat has eaten and passed; it doesn't. The nuts are cracked and pressed separately, by hand.

There are two distinct products from the same nut, worth not confusing: culinary argan oil is pressed from lightly roasted kernels, giving it a nutty, toasted flavour, and is the base for amlou, a spread of ground argan oil, almonds, and honey. Cosmetic-grade oil is cold-pressed from unroasted kernels instead, lighter and less pungent, and made specifically for skin and hair use. They aren't interchangeable.

Much of the oil sold to visitors, and most of what's exported, now comes through women's cooperatives, a model formalised from the 1990s onward partly as a deliberate economic structure: cracking the shell around each nut by hand is slow, genuinely difficult work, traditionally done by Amazigh women in the region. Buying from a named cooperative rather than an unmarked roadside stall is a reasonable way to have some idea where the money is actually going.