Question: Cod liver oil and omega-3 in lotions.

Will writes: A weird question for a Friday! I read in a press release where Dial Corp is attributing significant skin benefits in their new products to Vitamin F, aka Omega-3, aka cod liver oil (one of many). Have you ever experimented with cod liver oil in a lotion? I'm curious as heck, but I can't remember if it had a smell. What's your take on that? Seems Great-Grandma with her cod liver oil was ahead of her time ;D

I personally love cod liver oil: As a kid, my mom had to hide the bottle because I'd eat the caplets like candy. (I know, I was odd!) I have found that cod liver oil and the other omega 3 oils, like salmon oil, do smell and taste fishy, so I don't think it's the best idea to include those in a lotion. (The salmon oil has a "lemony taste" derived from some kind of flavouring oil, which really makes it more like lemony fish than anything pleasant!) People who find Incroquat BTMS-50 has a fishy smell will really hate this combination!

So what is an omega-3 fatty acid? It's a fatty acid with a carbon to carbon double bond in the n-3 position, which is the third bond from the end of the chain. It's related to linolenic acid, and we can find it as alpha-linolenic acid in our oils.

We can find omega-3 in a number of our oils, like hemp seed, acai oil, soybean oil, borage oil, rosehip, and sea buckthorn seed (and less so the pulp) so including those can give you the awesome power of omega-3 oils in your products without the fragrance of fish!

We know omega-3 fatty acids are supposed to be good from a nutritional standpoint, but does it do anything for our skin? Yep, it can help moisturize dry, scaly, chapped skin and can help us prevent further chapping, so it's a great option for winter time products! The main reason to include omega-3 fatty acids in our products is to assist with inflammation, which is borne out in recent studies, so something like soybean oil is an awesome (and inexpensive) combination for our skin with the linoleic acid and high levels of phytosterols!

So, Will, it's not a weird question, although I still can't get over the idea of including this oil in my products. I like to eat the capsules, not wear them!