Dated at the press.

What's in the Bottle

Every bottle carries the day the fruit was pressed, because in this category that number tells you more than anything else on the label.

18 mo Pressing Date Printed
Single Strength, Never Fivefold
Chilled Storage Recommended
Every Lot Residue Screened

Why the Date Is the Number

A best-by date is a calculation somebody made about a bottle. A pressing date is a fact about the oil inside it. We print the fact and leave the arithmetic to you.

Tangerine is mostly limonene, and limonene reacts with oxygen. What it becomes is not just a duller smell: the oxidation products include hydroperoxides that are recognized skin sensitizers. A tired bottle of citrus is a different article against skin than a fresh one, and that is the real argument for printing the date.

We quote a year and a half from pressing, kept capped and cool. Cold storage is not fussiness in this category, it is the single most useful thing a buyer can do, and it is the one piece of advice we would keep if we had to drop every other.

So buy the size you will actually finish. A half ounce used up in three months beats eight ounces going slowly flat, and we would rather sell you the small bottle twice.

Pressed On

The pressing date and the lot number, stamped rather than inferred.

Origin Named

Brazil or Argentina, printed. A bottle that will not say is telling you something.

Untouched

No antioxidant, no diluent, no folding, and amber glass at every size.

Ripe tangerines with a long curl of peel beside a small bottle of oil

Candy-Bright, and Easy to Counterfeit

Tangerine is the sweetest and most straightforwardly cheerful citrus on the shelf, closer to peeling the fruit than lemon or mandarin manages. That popularity is exactly why the market around it is thick with material that has been worked on.

Folded oils are the usual case. Fivefold and terpene-less tangerine are legitimate products with a real purpose in flavor work, where the terpenes are dead weight. They are not what we sell, and treating them as interchangeable with the pressed oil would be sloppy.

What ships from here is single strength: the oil as it came off the fruit, with nothing taken out to concentrate it and nothing put in to hold it together.

Off the Juice Line, Then Cleaned Up

Juice is the reason the fruit goes into the machine at all. The peel surrenders its oil on that same run, whole fruit at a time, and what leaves the machine is an emulsion rather than oil. We are not the ones running that machine, and saying so plainly beats implying a press we do not own.

From the emulsion it is centrifuged twice, once to drop the solids and once at speed to part the oil from the water, then held near freezing long enough for the waxes to settle out before a last filtration. Clarity in the bottle is that hold and nothing more mysterious.

Our work starts at the specification and picks up again at the laboratory. Named extractors, written terms, and a check on everything that lands.

Sealed steel drums in a chilled settling room at a citrus plant

Checked On Arrival, Every Time

Three things we want settled before a drum is broken down into bottles.

Is it single strength?

A composition run by GC/MS shows a folded or terpene-adjusted oil at once, whatever the paperwork claims.

Is it clean?

Some hundreds of residues, screened by tandem mass spectrometry after both gas and liquid chromatography, because peel oil concentrates the surface of the fruit.

How old is it?

The pressing date, verified against the lot on arrival and carried onto the bottle instead of restarting the clock here.

The report for your lot is yours for the asking. We post no certificates for general browsing, because the only one worth reading is the one matching what you bought.

The Warning That Does Not Apply Here

Tangerine is classified non-phototoxic, so we will not hang a sun-exposure warning on it. Cold-pressed lemon genuinely carries that risk and lemon says so; repeating it across every citrus oil would only make the real one easier to ignore.

The cautions that do apply are short. Carrier oil first, a patch of skin before a shoulder, out of reach of small hands, and respect the date on the bottle. Oxidized citrus is the version that causes problems.

No medical claims are made for it. If a season comes in short we sell out and say so, rather than quietly blending to cover the gap.

Fresh, Single Strength, and Dated

Peel oil taken off juice lines we can name, in Brazil and Argentina, cleaned up properly, never folded, and carrying the date the fruit went through the machine.

Then use it up.

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These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. Products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.