How Botanical Oils Won Over the West https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/10/t-magazine/essential-oils-skin-care.html Nude Barre bra, $25, nudebarre.com. Drunk Elephant Virgin Marula Luxury Facial Oil, $72, drunkelephant.com.Credit...Photograph by Miranda Barnes. Styled by Carlos Nazario The 2000s How Botanical Oils Won Over the West Though they’ve been prized since the dawn of civilization around the world, these natural elixirs have now taken on an almost religious aura for wellness types. Nude Barre bra, $25, nudebarre.com. Drunk Elephant Virgin Marula Luxury Facial Oil, $72, drunkelephant.com.Credit...Photograph by Miranda Barnes. Styled by Carlos Nazario May 10, 2021 IT IS INDIFFERENT to beauty, this ragged tree that disdains soil and grows among the rocks, under bald sun and lashing winds, feeding on difficulty. Short as trees go, it has a hunkered-down look, its branches starting low to the ground and crooking and knotting as they rise. The most prized species make their home in the gullies and wadis of Dhofar in southern Oman and Hadhramaut in war-torn eastern Yemen, and along the cliffs and scarps of the Cal Madow mountains in Somaliland, whose 1991 declaration of independence from Somalia has gone unrecognized by the rest of the world. The Indigenous people of these regions brave snakes and scorpions to climb the trees and press a knife to the papery bark, just enough to break through the green skin beneath. Wounded, the tree begins to ooze, trying to heal itself, its viscous tears hardening into a resin that has been sought after and suffered over for nearly 5,000 years.