Dilo Oil: The Fijian Ingredient Behind Pure Fiji

If you have used Pure Fiji, you have used dilo. It is in the body butters, the oils, the balms. It is also the ingredient almost nobody can name, because coconut takes the credit on the front of the bottle.

Dilo deserves better. It is the more interesting of the two.

What dilo actually is

Dilo is the Fijian name for Calophyllum inophyllum, a tree that grows along the coast right through the Pacific. You may know it as tamanu, which is the Tahitian name, or as beauty leaf. The tree drops a round green fruit with a nut inside, and that nut is where the oil comes from.

The part that makes dilo unusual is what happens next. A fresh dilo nut yields almost nothing. It has to be cracked and then left to cure in the sun for weeks, sometimes months, until the kernel darkens and turns sticky with oil. Only then can it be pressed. The finished oil is thick, dark green, and smells green and nutty rather than sweet.

There is no way to rush that, which is a large part of why dilo has never become a supermarket ingredient. It is also why Pure Fiji presses at source in Fiji rather than shipping nuts somewhere else, a point we covered in why this is not your average coconut oil.

What researchers have looked at

Dilo has drawn genuine scientific interest, though it is worth being clear about what that does and does not mean. Most of this work is laboratory or formulation research rather than large clinical trials on people, so it tells us what the oil contains and how it behaves in a lab, not what it will do for your skin.

Researchers analysing the fatty acid profile of Calophyllum seed oil alongside borage and prickly pear found it sits in a distinctive place chemically, with a mix of fatty acids and other plant compounds not typical of common carrier oils (Fratianni and colleagues, Antioxidants, 2025). A separate group screening five Pacific plants, dilo among them, identified a range of antioxidant metabolites in the plant material (Chambon and colleagues, Antioxidants, 2023).

The most direct work is formulation research. One team built tamanu oil into a gel system and studied it as a potential anti-scarring preparation, combining computational modelling with laboratory testing (Krishnappa and colleagues, Pharmaceuticals, 2024). That is an early-stage investigation into a formulation, not evidence that a body butter will change a scar, and we would be overstating it badly if we implied otherwise.

What all of this supports is a modest, honest claim: dilo is a well-characterised plant oil that scientists find worth studying, and it has been used on skin in the Pacific for a very long time.

What it feels like to use

Dilo is heavier than coconut oil and sinks in more slowly. In the Pure Fiji range it is usually blended rather than used alone, which is the sensible way to handle it. Blended, you get the richness without the weight or the strong green smell of the raw oil.

It tends to suit the places that take a beating. Hands, elbows, heels, shins in winter. If you want the broader picture on how plant oils behave on skin, we went into that in what plant oils actually do.

Where to find it

Dilo runs through most of the Pure Fiji range rather than sitting in one hero product, so the easiest way in is simply to pick the format you will actually use. If you are starting from scratch, which Pure Fiji products to buy first is the place to begin.

You can also come and smell the raw thing. We keep the range open in the salon at Parnell, and the difference between dilo and coconut is obvious the moment you put them side by side.