Is cheap black seed oil actually cheaper? Let's do the maths

Is cheap black seed oil actually cheaper? Let's do the maths

Everyone in this business argues about percentages. Almost nobody does the arithmetic on what those percentages mean once the bottle is sitting in your kitchen.

So let's do it properly. Two assumptions, both easy to check: black seed oil weighs about 0.92 g per ml, and a teaspoon is 5 ml. That's all you need.

First problem: most sellers don't give you a number

Before you can compare anything, you need a percentage. That's where most of the market falls over. Others say "up to 5%", which is a ceiling, not a measurement, and is satisfied by 0.05%. A handful publish a real report.

Look at ten black seed oil listings. Most will tell you the seeds are premium, the pressing is cold, the oil is pure. Almost none will tell you how much thymoquinone is actually in the bottle. Some give a figure with no lab, no date and no method behind it, which is a number in the way a horoscope is a forecast. A handful publish a real report.

So for this comparison we went looking for one we could actually use. We found a German seller offering a 200 ml bottle at €30, stated at 0.6% thymoquinone. We're using them not because their oil is bad, but because they're one of the few who published a figure at all. That's the bar in this industry right now.

One bottle, in grams

A 500 ml bottle holds about 460 g of oil. A 200 ml bottle holds about 184 g. The thymoquinone in each is just the weight times the percentage.

Nothing clever. But it's the first time most people see that number as a quantity instead of a decimal.

One teaspoon, in milligrams

A 5 ml teaspoon is about 4.6 g of oil.

Same spoon, same routine, same face you pull afterwards. Five times the compound everybody came for.

However there are two things we're not going to pretend

Thymoquinone isn't everything. It's the compound most of the research is about and the one everybody advertises, which makes it the fair basis for a comparison. But you're buying an oil, not a molecule. Fatty acids, freshness, how it was pressed and whether it was filtered all matter too. This is a value calculation

All of this collapses if the number is fake. Every figure above assumes the label is telling the truth. We took their 0.6% at face value from their own website. Ours is 3.02% by HPLC and 2.99% by NMR, at Eurofins, on this harvest, and you can read the report. 

Now the price, which is where it gets funny

Their bottle is €30 for 200 ml, so €0.15 per ml. Ours is €85 for 500 ml delivered, so €0.17 per ml.

Their bottle is cheaper. On the shelf, they win.

Then you look at what you're actually buying:

Cheaper per milliliter. Four and a half times more expensive per gram of thymoquinone.

To get as much thymoquinone as one of our bottles holds, you'd need about thirteen of theirs. That's €378, and two and a half liters of oil to get through before it goes rancid.

Per day, which is how you'll actually live with it

Take a teaspoon a day of ours and you're getting 139 mg of thymoquinone. A 500 ml bottle lasts about 100 days. That's 85 cents a day.

To get the same 139 mg out of a 0.6% oil you'd need five teaspoons. Twenty-five milliliters, every day. Their 200 ml bottle lasts you eight days. That's €3.75 a day, and you're drinking five times as much oil to get there.

The cheap bottle costs four times more per day and takes five times the spoons.

Do it yourself on any bottle

Two sums, thirty seconds:

Grams of TQ in the bottle = millilitres × 0.92 × the percentage
Cost per gram = price ÷ that number

Run it on ours. Run it on anyone's. And if a seller can't tell you the percentage at all, you can't run it, which tells you something on its own: you're buying the label design.

P.S. The hardest part of writing this wasn't the maths. It was finding a competitor who published enough information to be compared with.