Most people meet black sesame on a bagel or in a scoop of grey-purple ice cream and think of it as a garnish — a nice little accent, a bit of crunch. It is one of the most quietly important plants in human history.
Sesame is the oldest oilseed crop we know of. It was being farmed on the Indian subcontinent more than 5,500 years ago, which makes it older than most of the empires that would later come to prize it. It's so drought-hardy it grows where other crops give up, and it carries so much oil that ancient farmers called it the queen of oilseeds. By 2000 BC it was moving along trade routes between the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia, where the Sumerians already had a word for it. The Egyptians grew it, called it sesemt, and listed it among their medicines.
And almost everywhere it travelled, people didn't just eat it. They built meaning around it — luck, longevity, warmth, secrets, the wisdom of elders. This is the story of that meaning: black sesame folklore, culture, and belief, from a magic cave in a Persian folktale to a garden plot in South Carolina.
The seed that bursts open on its own
Here's the small botanical fact that explains a surprising amount of the folklore: a ripe sesame pod splits open by itself. Leave it a day too long in the field and it pops, scattering its seeds — which is exactly why almost all commercial sesame today is a special "non-shattering" variety, bred so the harvest doesn't fling itself to the wind.
That little detail — a pod that springs open at the right moment to reveal its treasure — is very likely why sesame ended up attached to the most famous magic words in the world.
"Open Sesame" — the most famous secret in literature
You already know the phrase. Fewer people know it's sesame the seed.
"Open, sesame" comes from "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," part of the One Thousand and One Nights. The tale entered European reading through Antoine Galland's French translation in the early 1700s — adapted, as it happens, from stories told to him by a Syrian storyteller named Hanna Diyab. In Arabic the words are iftaḥ yā simsim — literally "open, O sesame." Simsim is simply the Arabic word for the seed.
Why sesame, of all things, for a spell that opens a sealed cave of treasure? The most satisfying explanation is the botanical one: a sesame pod bursts open on its own to reveal what's inside, the perfect metaphor for a rock face swinging wide to show a hoard of gold. There's an older layer too — the Babylonians treated sesame oil as a substance with magical properties, and one Assyrian myth even has the gods sharing sesame wine the night before they got around to creating the earth.
So the next time someone says "open sesame," they're unknowingly reaching back through Persian folktales, Arabic vernacular, and Mesopotamian magic — all riding on the back of a seed that already knew how to open on cue.
East Asia: the longevity seed
If the Middle East gave sesame its magic, East Asia gave it its reputation for keeping you young.
By tradition, sesame reached China along the Silk Road, and it was quickly absorbed into traditional Chinese medicine as a tonic — a food you eat over time to build the body up rather than fix it fast. Black sesame in particular became associated with longevity, kidney and liver health, and glossy black hair. There's a saying in Chinese medicine that "the kidneys open to the hair," and black foods are thought to nourish the kidney system — so a black seed that might keep hair dark and full fit the logic perfectly. Daoist health philosophy went further still and treated black sesame as something close to a food of the immortals.
You can see that belief in what black sesame gets served in to this day: a new mother's congee, an elder's morning porridge, a warm bowl of black sesame soup at the winter solstice, sweet black-sesame-filled rice balls at the Lantern Festival. It shows up wherever the cultural message is warmth, richness, and taking care.
In Japan, sesame — goma — is a daily ritual rather than a remedy. Toasted seeds are ground fresh in a suribachi, a ridged ceramic mortar, right before a meal so the aroma blooms. Black sesame, kurogoma, turns up in Buddhist temple cuisine (shōjin ryōri), in gomashio (sesame salt), in furikake, and in confections — always carrying that quiet association with vitality and long life. Across China, Korea, and Japan, black sesame is a food you reach for at new beginnings and auspicious moments, not just for flavor but for what it's understood to mean.
(An honest footnote: the hair-darkening and anti-aging beliefs are traditional. Modern clinical evidence for black sesame specifically reversing grey hair is thin. What's true is that it's a genuinely nutritious seed — and that a food carrying five thousand years of "this is good for you" is worth respecting on those terms.)
India: "take some sesame, and speak sweetly"
In India, sesame — til — is one of the oldest and most sacred plants in the culture, woven through Ayurveda for skin, hair, and digestion, and used in everything from cooking oil to ritual.
But the most beautiful piece of sesame folklore anywhere might belong to the festival of Makar Sankranti, the mid-January harvest festival that marks the sun's turn toward longer days. Across Maharashtra, people exchange tilgul — little sweets of sesame and jaggery (unrefined cane sugar) — and as they hand them over, they say:
"Tilgul ghya, god god bola."
Take this sesame and jaggery, and speak sweetly.
It's a greeting and a small act of peace at once. The sesame and the jaggery carry warmth into the cold season; the words ask for kindness, forgiveness of old grievances, and sweetness in the year ahead. A whole philosophy of how to treat each other, folded into a bite of sesame candy.
If you've ever felt that black sesame tastes like restraint and warmth at the same time — nutty, deep, only gently sweet — this festival is a few thousand years ahead of you.
The Levant and the Middle East: simsim, tahini, and simsimiyya
Come west and sesame stops being medicine and becomes the backbone of a whole pantry.
In the Levant and across the Arab world, simsim (سمسم) is everywhere. Ground into tahini, the base of hummus and baba ghanoush. Whipped with sugar into halawa (halva). Baked onto ka'ak bread rings and folded into the spice blend za'atar. And pressed with caramelized sugar into simsimiyya (سمسمية) — the sesame-and-sugar candy bar sold at the corner shop, snapped into pieces, gone before you got home.
For diaspora families especially, sesame is a taste of there — the flavor that shows up at every celebration, every Ramadan table, every grandmother's tin of sweets. It doesn't need folklore attached to it. It is the folklore: proof that the old kitchen still travels with you.
(This is the story behind our own Simsimiyya tee — the word in its own language first, Arabic and English side by side. Some candies are a recipe. This one is a memory.)
Africa to the Americas: benne, the goodwill seed
There's one more journey, and it's the heaviest and least-told.
Sesame's wild relatives are native to sub-Saharan Africa, and across West Africa the seed was — and is — food, medicine, and a symbol of good fortune, planted in home gardens and given as a gift to invite good luck. The word for it in Wolof, Mande, Bambara, Mende, and related languages is some version of benne.
That word crossed the Atlantic in the most brutal way possible. Enslaved West Africans carried benne to the Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry in the early 1700s and grew it in the small garden plots they were allowed — plots that were a matter of survival, since plantation rations were meager. Benne fed them, and it kept something of home alive: the Gullah people called it the "goodwill" plant, and the belief that it brought good luck and warded off harm travelled with it.
Out of that history came a lasting piece of American food culture: the benne wafer, a thin, toasted-sesame Charleston cookie still made today and still handed out — at weddings, to guests — as a token of good fortune. Benne became foundational to Gullah Geechee cooking, and chefs carrying that tradition forward have brought the heirloom seed back to the center of the plate. It's a reminder that some of the most beloved flavors in Southern food were kept alive, against everything, by the people with the least.
That the same little seed can mean a magic password in one place, a grandmother's remedy in another, and a hard-won thread of home and good luck in a third — that's the whole point. Sesame is a small archive of how people, everywhere, turn what they eat into what they believe.
Why we put a seed in sunglasses
We built The Black Sesame because all of this is true and almost nobody talks about it.
The folklore is real. The reverence is real, across cultures that never compared notes. The "good for your hair, good for your health, grandmother was right" that the Folklore Line wears out loud isn't a marketing invention — it's five thousand years of people paying attention. The obsession the Confessions confess to has deep roots. And the Cast — the bold roasted lead and the earnest lighter understudy — is just us giving that ancient seed the personality it's clearly had all along.
A little seed with a very long memory. Sweet, but not too sweet.
👉 Explore the collections: The Cast · Folklore Line · The Confessions
A note on sources: the history above draws on published cultural and botanical scholarship — including work on sesame's domestication and trade, the etymology of "open sesame," traditional Chinese medicine and Japanese culinary tradition, the Makar Sankranti tilgul custom, and the documented history of benne among Gullah Geechee communities in the Carolina Lowcountry (notably the research of botanist Dorothea Bedigian and the Charleston County Public Library's historical work). Where a belief is traditional rather than clinically proven — especially health claims — we've said so.