The other day I wrote about a camellia oil facial mask on the blog, and we were immediately asked how to make one.

If you want soft, smooth skin and shiny hair with very little effort, you must try it!

Before you get in the bathtub, take 5 to 6 drops of Pure Camellia Oil, if your hair is shoulder length. The amount may be a little more than you usually use. Then start by massaging the oil into your scalp, and apply it thoroughly to the rest of your hair from the roots to the tips.

After washing your face, take 3 drops of Camellia Skincare Oil and massage it into your entire face. The amount may be a little more than you usually use for moisturizing. Spread it thoroughly over your face and neck, avoiding the area around your eyes.

You’re ready to get into the bath once you’ve applied your hair and skin treatments. You may shampoo afterwards, but if you want to enhance the effect of the treatment, first wrap your hair in a steamed towel, and apply your preferred face mask and stay in the bathtub for a little while longer.

‹A foaming net that lathers your facewash as well as whipped cream and a face mask›

The power of natural oil is something to be celebrate.
You will likely feel a sense of satisfaction and well-being that you that is hard to achieve even with expensive cosmetics!

In the afternoon of Sat. Oct. 3rd, we held a workshop titled “Oil for beauty”, hosted by the Central Japan Railway Company. During the workshop, there was a talk on oils that make us beautiful from both the inside and out, as well as an oil tasting experience.

First we held a lecture at “Demizu Townhouse”, just across the street from our shop.
Then we presented the participants with a quiz:

Yamanaka Cooking Oil Co. was founded about two hundred years ago during the late Edo Period. What was their main oil product offered at the time?
① Rapeseed oil for votive lights dedicated to Shinto or Buddhist deities
② Sesame cooking oil
③ Camellia oil for applying to hair/skin

The answer is ①.　Rapeseed oil for votive lights dedicated to Shinto or Buddhist deities.

We tend to have a negative image of cooking oil, that it’s high in calories, it causes weight gain and makes your kitchen greasy, for example. However, high quality oil is not only tasty, but good for your health and enhances your beauty to boot. It can add luster to your surroundings too. The aim of the workshop was reversing the negative image of oil.

We offer two camellia oil products: “Kyo Tsubaki Camelia Skincare Oil” for skincare or haircare and “Pure Camellia Oil” specifically for haircare. As you remember, we’ve introduced camellia oil as the ultimate beauty oil.

The forthcoming winter makes us worry about dry skin.
“Kyo Tsubaki Camellia Skincare Oil” is an essential item at this time of year. You can use it as a moisturizing base before applying your makeup. It’s not only for women, it’s also very popular as an aftershave.

We recommend “Pure Camellia Oil” for your haircare regime.
Applying it to your towel-dried hair and scalp helps keep your hair moisturized and easy to style.

This set of camellia oil and boxwood combs has protected Japanese women’s long black hair since ancient. Boxwood tress grow very slowly and thus, while they’re tough, their tissue is very fine and its rings are delicate. These characteristics make it ideal for high-grade comb production, but it’s also used to make Japanese chess pieces and abacus beads.

In the past, people rarely washed their hair and used to remove dirt and dandruff by gently rubbing camellia oil into their scalps and running a comb through their hair afterwards.
Boxwood combs don’t create static electricity and, with proper care, can be used for generations.
That’s why we also wanted to introduce how to take care of the combs.

When you buy a new boxwood comb, place it in a plastic bag with five to ten drops of camellia oil and leave it to soak overnight.
Since boxwood combs are made of high-grade wood, please be sure to only use camellia oil when caring for them.

The boxwood comb needs to be cleaned and cared for every two to three months.
A comb with fine teeth is particularly apt to retaining dirt and dandruff, so if it is not well-oiled, the comb ends up absorbing the grease from your scalp.

Although it may seem like a hassle to have to clean your boxwood comb, you can save plenty of time by using camellia oil. Soak a cotton bud with camellia oil and run it over the comb. Leave it for about 10 minutes and then gently clean the comb with a soft toothbrush. For fine dirt between the teeth of the comb, use something like an interdental brush or dental floss. The word “toothbrush” suddenly takes on a second meaning when you us it on the teeth of your comb!

Since camellia oil doesn’t dry out, it’s the perfect oil for moisture preservation and oil retention It’s referred to as a non-drying oil.

To keep items or furniture around you looking its best, drying oils are used as they are more readily absorbed and provide a highly waterproof sheen.
Perilla seed oil, tung oil, and linseed oil all belong to this category of oils that dry and are indispensable in the upkeep of the wooden lattices used in Kyoto’s townhouses. After you coat the wood with persimmon tannin or red ocher, which has insecticidal and antiseptic properties, oil is thoroughtly rubbed into the wood.

Yamanaka’s red ocher lattices have been treated with rapeseed oil.. However, rapeseed oil is considered a half-drying oil. Our fifth owner, now 86 years old says “Drying-oil is something you use at the very end”. This means that now, after two hundred years, we are still maintaining the wood with half-drying oil, our lattices have not reached the point of needing a drying-oil finish.
Therefore, we still treat the lattices with rapeseed oil, overlapping the profundity of life lessons with the oil.

Aside from red ocher lattices, drying oil is also applied to “washi” or traditional handmade Japanese paper when making ban-gasa, traditional Japanese umbrellas. We cannot help but marvel at how much knowledge regarding the myriad uses of various oils our ancestors were able to accumulate through experience.

After the lecture, we moved onto a café/wine bar called “Ryoki-den” for the next bit of fun – oil and food tasting!

What do we mean by a fun food tasting event?
Having ice-cream drizzled in oil!
One of the most popular items on Ryoki-den’s dessert menu is their “Amazing! Vanilla Ice-cream”.
They use a special “something” as an ice-cream topping. The topping is, you guessed it, olive oil!
It’s so delicious that people actually voice their amazement – you hear “wow! That’s amazing!” from every corner of the café. That’s how it got its name.

At the workshop, our guests tried our olive oils infused with orange and lemon, as well as our ball-pressed pure sesame seed oil and fragrant peanut oil. Here is what we heard:
“It’s much tastier than expected!”
“How can oil be so refreshing?”
“Ice-cream with sesame oil was especially fun because it suddenly gave the ice-cream a hint of Japan!”

We would like to thank our twenty guests who came from all over the country.
We also appreciate the patience of those applicants who exceeded our capacity.
Whether you were able to come to the workshop or not, we hope to have the pleasure of meeting you at our shop.

Enhance your beauty with camellia oil!

So, how should people today use camellia oil?

First, let me introduce you to my recommended hair-care routine.

After washing your hair with shampoo, dry your hair with a towel, take two to three drops of camellia oil onto your palm, and massage it into your scalp carefully with your fingertips. (My hair is shoulder length. If your hair is short, apply just one to two drops.) Then gently apply the remaining oil on your palm to the rest of your hair.
You can complete this wonderful experience by brushing your hair with a boxwood comb.
You may use a hairdryer afterwards.
As my hair tangles easily, I sometimes run a detangling comb through it while drying it.

When you feel that your hair is badly damaged, try an oil hair masque when you next take a bath.
After washing your hair with shampoo, towel dry your hair massage plenty, say a spoonful, of camellia oil into your scalp and hair. Wrap your hair in a steamed towel and let the oil soak thoroughly into your hair and scalp, while you soak in the bath.
Afterwards, gently rinse your hair with lukewarm water.
You won’t need to use hair conditioner after this treatment.
I assure you, once you try this ritual, you won’t look back!

I’ve waxed lyrical about my combs, now let me move on to how to use camellia oil.

A long time ago, when Japanese women wore their hair in traditional styles or had their long hair done up, there was no shampoo and no conditioner. So, they rarely washed their hair.

How did they do their haircare?

It was, of course, camellia oil that played an active part in women’s haircare back then.

First, they rubbed the oil into their scalps until it diffused into their hair.
They would run a boxwood comb infused with camellia oil gently through their hair. That comb is said to be the detangling comb I introduced in Chapter 1 on June 11th.

Camellia oil is known for possessing properties similar to sebum and therefore being highly moisturizing. It is said that by rubbing camellia oil into your scalp, both dirt and dandruff are removed from the scalp and can be carried away using a boxwood comb, without causing static electricity.

However, neither camellia oil nor boxwood combs were for the average person. They were rather expensive and beyond the reach of ordinary people.

During the Heian period, the grounds of our shop were a part of the Imperial Palace.
I imagine that as long as a thousand years ago, ladies of the Imperial family and court nobles maintained their osube-rakashi – a distinctive hairstyle similar to that of a traditional Japanese doll with long, black hair – with precious camellia oil and a boxwood comb. When I think of that, I feel the historic essence of Kyoto deliver a sense of romanticism to the history of oil.

These days, our hair is constantly under attack from hair color and perm treatments.
Even in this modern context, the ancient camellia oil has its place.
It is so easy to use.
After washing your hair with shampoo and/or conditioner, dry it with a towel. If your hair is long, blow dry it a little.
Now that your hair is half-dry, apply one or two drops of Pure Camellia Oil to your scalp and massage it in carefully with your fingertips.
Afterwards, apply a little oil to the ends of your hair, and then let your hair dry. Now it’s time to marvel at how shiny and lustrous your hair is!

A styling comb has the image of something an adult woman uses. Is that because it lived quietly on my grandmother’s and mother’s dressing table?

I remember my grandmother using a styling comb to back-comb her hair, or to arrange it when she wore it up, so my image of styling combs was that of something an elderly woman uses. But now I use the comb myself. I cannot help but feel the flow of time.

As I have wavy hair and am not very good at styling it, I keep it shoulder length so I can tie it into a ponytail, to save time in the morning.

I was reluctant to use a styling boxwood comb because I had assumed the teeth would be too fine to pass through my hair, of course, the aforementioned image of it being for elderly women hadn’t helped. With the words of the shop clerk, “It will make your hair look lustrous,” feeling skeptical but with an added sense of hope, the invited the styling comb into my collection of boxwood combs.

The styling comb quickly became an essential item for brushing, smoothing and arranging my hair. It does not leave any traces on my hair, and makes it look shiny.
Even when I leave my hair down, I feel groomed with just one brush of the comb.

The comb’s best feature is the lack of static electricity.
It’s durable, too. In addition, the more you use it, the more character it builds.

My styling boxwood comb would be nothing without its camellia oil – they’re a perfect match!
In the next chapter, I will tell you how to make best use of the oil.

In February this year, I visited an exhibition on Japanese traditional artisanal craftsmen held at a department store in Kyoto, where I bought this boxwood hairbrush.

I had been on the lookout for a brush like this, so you can imagine how happy I was to meet a craftsman making exactly that.

It feels so great whenever I use my boxwood brush!

Actually, when I was looking up boxwood combs on the internet, I came across this particular brush. I gave them a call and found out that they had set up a temporary shop in Kyoto. What a coincidence! I headed over straightaway.

The feel of boxwood brushes differs depending on the space between the teeth and the direction of the rows of teeth. By direction, we mean whether the teeth are placed vertically or splaying outwards. I chose the one with five rows of outwardly splayed teeth. It’s nice and compact, fitting easily into the palm of my hand and it glides flexibly yet firmly along my scalp.

I really enjoyed chatting with the people at the shop. They carved a cherry blossom motif and my name on my brush. As if I didn’t love my new brush enough already! Thank you very much!

As long as you use this brush alongside a few drops of camellia oil, you’ll never have to worry about static electricity or severed hairs, and smoothing out that bed head couldn’t be easier.

After gently massaging your scalp with the brush, untangle your hair with a wide-toothed comb. Next up you’ll need a styling comb, which I’ll show you in the next chapter.

Japanese women have enjoyed the protective and enhancing properties of camellia oil since ancient times.
As an oil specialist, it made sense for me to use camellia oil on my hair and since I started to do so regularly, my dry, wavy hair has been straight and shiny.

Seeing such positive results, I decided to go all the way and started using a traditional Japanese boxwood comb with the camellia oil. Three years into this beauty ritual, people around me started to comment on how beautiful and lustrous my hair was. That’s not a compliment I was used to hearing!

My grandmother was born in the Meiji Era, over a hundred year ago. Her small dressing table wafted the aroma of camellia oil. In fact, some customers say, “Wow, this oil smells like my grandma” or “It brings back memories of grandma!”

he first boxwood comb I bought is called a “detangling comb”. My hair is a little bit coarse and stiff, and tangles easily, so I chose one with teeth that were not too fine. Boxwood combs come in various sizes so when choosing one I held them in my hand until I could tell which was easiest for me to handle.

Made of authentic boxwood from Satsuma, or the southernmost Kyushu Island, my comb was expensive. I decided to buy it anyway, the craftsman’s words convinced me: use it carefully and it will last a lifetime.

I strolled into some other shops and bought a larger comb, as well as a smaller one for my makeup bag; both play slightly different roles.
The comb in the photo is my favorite, it caresses my scalp so gently. The way the comb feels is said to differ depending on the craftsman who made it. The experience also differs depending on who uses the comb. Meaning the best way to find your perfect boxwood comb is to try a few.

Later, I will tell you about other types of boxwood combs as well as how to take care of the combs, and your hair as well.