Sweet almond oil is a viscous oil with a yellowy colour. Cosmetic scientists like it because it gives a rich lubricious feel to cream formulations. Marketers like it because it sounds natural. More on that in a minute. It contains a lot of unsaturated fatty chains. This is something that might turn out to have some benefits for the skin, though there is no formal evidence I can cite to justify this at present. The skin contains some chemicals that look a lot like the unsaturated bits of sweet almond oil and which seem to help protect the skin against bacteria. It isn’t impossible that adding sweet almond to the skin boosts this sort of thing and so helps build the skin’s barrier and protective function. Continue reading
Despite what a lot of marketing suggests, there is no particular reason to suppose that natural ingredients are safer or superior to synthetic ones. It depends on what you are doing with them. It’s horses for courses. You pick the material that has the properties you need. But on the whole most of the time I prefer natural oils over 
