What is orange essence and how to get it in League of Legends

League of Legends is packed with various skins, ward skins, emotes, and icons that serve no functional purpose, but rather give you exciting festive tools to either celebrate a real-life event like Chinese New Year, or a League-specific lore event like Spirit Blossom. Although Riot Games loves to keep content tied to events by earning and spending tokens, skins and other cosmetics can normally be bought in the shop for Riot Points, or RP for short. 

Generally speaking, RP is the main League currency that can be used to buy almost everything you set your mind to, except Prestige Edition skins, Mythic chromas, and wards. Essentially, RP can buy you almost everything in League. Still, buying RP costs money, and those RP receipts can easily pile up. So, Riot invented orange essence as a means of gathering skins, wards, emotes, and icons for free. 

If you’re still a stranger to the orange essence system in League, here’s everything you need to know about orange essence, including what exactly orange essence is, what you can use it for, and how to get it.

What is orange essence in League?

Orange essence is a rare League currency used to unlock skins, emotes, and wards you obtained from Hextech and Masterwork Chests, and various event orbs and capsules.

Once you open a chest, and get, for example, a skin, that skin still technically isn’t yours. Before you can use that skin, you need to have the correct amount of orange essence, and then you need to click on the greyed-out skin and unlock it.

Other than unlocking your skins, you can use orange essence to unlock wards, emotes, and icons that you’d also previously gotten from a specific chest or orb. 

Remember, the rarer the skin is, the more orange essence it will cost to unlock it. 

How to get orange essence in League

There are two main methods of obtaining orange essence: disenchanting and events. 

Once you get a skin or ward from a chest or an event orb, you can either opt for crafting it with orange essence, or you can disenchant it for more orange essence. The rarer the skin is, the more orange essence it will give you. And remember, once you disenchant a skin or an emote, that will consume your skin shard.

Events in League normally feature an event pass that has milestones awarding your consistent grind and devotion. One of the milestones is, as a rule, orange essence. The rewards usually average from 500 orange essence to 750 orange essence. So, if you’re spending your orange essence regularly, events are easily your safest source of orange essence.