What are Essential Oils?
It makes me a little crazy how many people confuse essential oils with essential fatty acids, using Lavender and Sunflower Oil in the same breath for example. These are two completely different uses of the word essential. Fatty oils like Avocado and Sunflower, are typically a natural ‘cocktail’ of essential fatty acids. The word essential means you can’t make them yourself, so you must have them in your diet to maintain optimal health. Fatty acids are in everything from nuts to a Porkchop. They are ‘essential’ to everything from healthy skin and joints to hormone production. They are ‘hydrophobic’ which means they’re afraid of water, so when you make soup, the fat rises to the surface.
Essential oils are a mixture of much smaller molecules, typically coming from aromatic parts of a plant, mostly flowers and leaves, but sometimes roots, barks and even wood. In ancient times, healers and perfumers felt they were capturing the Spirit or ‘essence’ of a plant, and the results are also hydrophobic, floating to the top of water as fatty oils do, so they dubbed them ‘Essential’ oils. There’s nothing ‘oily’ about an essential oil. If you put a few drops of any clear oil like lavender on a clean piece of paper and leave it in a warm place for a couple hours, there will be absolutely nothing to see or smell. Some authors tell you to do this as a test that your oils haven’t been diluted. Anything resinous like Patchouli will leave a brown stain there for a hundred years. Even Bergamot is green, and will leave a green stain there. If they fail to tell you that part, someone should slap them!
Most of our EO’s are steam distilled, and as the plant material is cooked, various types of storage pockets explode, and only compounds that are small and light enough to ‘fly’ with the steam can escape. Distilled water will hold an average of 1 - 3 parts per 1000 of essential oil before it is saturated, and after cooling, the oils will rise to the surface to be separated off.
There are a number of small acids that can fly along as well. The resulting liquid is called a ‘Floral Water’ or ‘Hydrosol’ and will have medicinal properties as well. At the very least, they are all mildly acidic, so can be used as excellent ‘toners’ for facial care. Most soap, and even tap water alone, are quite alkaline, so hydrosols help to restore the natural acidic pH of your skin’s protective coating. They are best used immediately following a wash, and then quickly apply whatever oil or cream you may be using. Inexpensive ‘Rose Water’ that you may find in the market is typically Rose scented water, and may be fine for cooking Rice, but useless for Cosmetic work. WitchHazel is an excellent toner as well, especially for oily or inflamed skin, as it is naturally astringent. Be careful that most WitchHazel you will find in a drug store is an alcohol extract that you likely don’t want on your face. A plant may have many other uses, but the active agents are simply too heavy to ‘fly’, so they wouldn’t show up in an essential oil. Other properties may show up in a water, alcohol, or glycerin extraction.
A few oils, citrus in particular, are cold pressed from the rinds of the fruit. They are very solvent in nature, and as such, show up in a lot of cleaning products for both household and commercial use. Orange essential oil doesn’t taste like concentrated juice, it’s very bitter. It comes from the rinds, which are removed before the juice is pressed. Extracting the oils then, are rather a bi-product of the fruit, so they are typically very inexpensive.
When plant material is steam distilled, it is surely cooked, so the oils will often smell much different than the raw plant. This heat degradation is most noticeable with flowers. In days
of old, the flowers would be carefully laid out on trays of pork fat, tamped down, and replaced with more flowers until the fat was saturated. The fragrant fat, called pomade, was used directly on the skin or in hair as perfume. Distilled alcohol was often used to reduce the fat concentration and prevent rancidity. This end product was called an enfleurage, still made by some perfumers, but very expensive due to all the hand labor. Don’t confuse this word with effleurage, which is a massage technique involving light strokes with little pressure, mostly for relaxation, as opposed to deep tissue work.
When petroleum solvents such as Benzene and Hexane emerged, most perfumers switched over to soaking the flowers in these solvents, then pressing them off and using various techniques to get rid of the solvent residue. Don’t be too alarmed by this, as these are the same solvents used for extracting the oils used in most Salad dressings, Mayonnaise and cooking oils. If the label doesn’t state ‘Cold Pressed’, that’s what you’re eating. The end result with the EO’s is called an Absolute. The benefit is no heat degradation, and usually a higher yield which typically means a better price. Other compounds like waxes and pigments tag along, so Absolutes are often thick, or very colorful. Rose Absolute for example is usually a dark red color and smells more like the fresh flowers did. Rose EO in contrast, is crystal clear, a much higher frequency, and better suited to Spiritual or etheric work. It’s also 40-50% higher in price, as much as 3 or 4 dollars a drop! Absolutes aren’t always cheaper, it all depends on the yield. I’ve purchased Ylang Ylang for example, which was much prettier to my nose, a little lighter than SD, and much more expensive.
If you ever inadvertently end up with an Absolute that you find suspicious of solvent residues, you may try just leaving the lid off for a few days. I’ve had this come up with Frankincense from Egypt for example. It had been purchased by a friend who didn’t know better. In some of these areas, the proper solvents may not be available, but they have orders to fill, so they use whatever they can find, such as Acetone.
One last category is ScCO2 oils. The Sc stands for Supercritical, The exact level where CO2 under enough pressure becomes a fog, not quite liquid, and is a perfect solvent. The upsides are no heat degradation, and no solvent residues. The downside is all the high pressure equipment is far more expensive than building a still, so price is usually an issue. As more products are being made however, amortization costs are reducing, so I’m seeing CO2 extracts showing up in everything from toothpaste to Ice Cream.
Most essential oils are used in cleaning products and food flavoring. Less than 5% are used in so-called ‘Aromatherapy’ products. Most authors will tell you to never use essential oils internally, yet EVERYTHING in a candy store has essential oils in it. If you chew gum, you’re using oils orally. Sucking on a Peppermint will likely settle an upset tummy, but would you call that Aromatherapy? It would still work if the user didn’t even have a nose!
So, what’s up with the double standard here? ‘Aromatherapy’ suggests that smell itself can have therapeutic effects, and that’s valid. Used at even minute dosages, oils can stimulate all sorts of changes in neurotransmitters and hormones, which go on to affect physical changes in the body. They are catalysts. Used in this way, they have something in common with Flower essences and Homeopathy. They are stimulating the body to heal itself.
Used in this way, why would you ever take them internally?
Back to the sore tummy, many people might reach for a bottle of ‘Pepto Bismol’ where the active ingredient is Peppermint oil. If I’m treating a Toenail fungus with Lemongrass and Tea
Tree oil, that’s not Aromatherapy. It’s Allopathic medicine. In both cases, it’s dose dependent. We should call that Pharmacognosy, or we could wrap up all of the above examples with the word Phytotherapy. Phyto is the Latin word for plant. Plant based therapies. This is why I prefer to call myself a Phytotherapist, as depending on circumstances, I may employ any or all of the above to suit a patient’s needs.
Written by Blaine Andrusek 2023