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I inherited the habit of oiling wood furniture from watching someone rub lemon oil into a dining table every few months, the way you would moisturize your hands. It looked caring and it smelled good, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to learn that most of the furniture in my own home was not built the way that table was, and that treating it the same way was doing nothing useful and occasionally something harmful.
The assumption behind the habit
The idea that wood needs to be fed with oil comes from real, older furniture: pieces finished with a true penetrating oil, like linseed or tung oil, that soaks into bare, unsealed wood and needs periodic reapplication to stay protected. That furniture genuinely does dry out over time, because the oil finish itself slowly oxidizes and wears, and refreshing it is correct maintenance.
But most furniture made in the last several decades, and a great deal of it made long before that too, is finished with varnish, lacquer, shellac, or polyurethane, all of which form a hard film sitting on top of the wood rather than soaking into it. Once that film is in place, the wood underneath is sealed off. It is not thirsty, and it cannot absorb oil through a finish that exists specifically to keep liquids out.
What actually happens when you oil a sealed finish
Oil applied to a sealed, film-finished surface has nowhere to go. It sits on top, and many commercial furniture oils and polishes contain silicone, which builds up in a slightly tacky layer that attracts dust rather than repelling it. That dull, sticky haze people associate with old furniture is frequently the residue of years of oiling a surface that was never able to absorb any of it.
Worse, silicone-based polish residue is notoriously difficult to remove and can interfere with future refinishing, since new varnish or lacquer will not bond properly to a silicone-contaminated surface. A piece polished faithfully for years can become harder to restore later precisely because of that faithful polishing.
How to tell what you actually have
Look at the surface in raking light, meaning light hitting it at a low angle. A film finish like varnish or lacquer shows an even sheen and sits visibly on top of the wood grain, almost like a thin sheet of plastic. A true oil finish looks and feels more matte and close to the wood, with the grain slightly raised and textured under your fingers rather than smoothed flat under a coating. An inconspicuous test spot, like the underside of a tabletop, touched with a drop of water can help too: water that beads on the surface indicates a sealed film finish, while water that darkens the wood slightly and absorbs within a minute or two suggests an open, oil-finished surface.
What sealed furniture actually needs
Film-finished furniture wants dusting with a slightly damp microfiber cloth and, occasionally, a plain furniture wax rather than an oil-based polish, since wax sits on the film and buffs to protection and shine without the residue problem. It does not need feeding, because there is no exposed wood underneath the film to feed. Dryness and haze on this kind of furniture usually mean built-up old polish or dust, not a lack of oil, and the fix is cleaning it off rather than adding another layer on top.
What genuinely oil-finished furniture needs
For the smaller category of furniture that really is finished in raw oil, periodic reapplication of the same type of oil the piece was originally finished in, applied thin and wiped back rather than left to pool, does keep the wood protected and looking consistent. This is the correct context for the ritual I grew up watching. It was simply being applied to the wrong furniture, on the assumption that all wood behaves the same way.
The corrected habit is not oiling less often or more often. It is checking what kind of finish is actually on a piece before doing anything to it, since a film finish and an open oil finish need close to opposite care, and treating one like the other either wastes effort or slowly degrades a surface that was never asking for it.
