How to distinguish natural essential oils from synthetic ones
Natural or not – how to understand which essential oil you are holding in your hands? We tell you how to distinguish a useful organic product from the achievements of the chemical industry, which are completely useless for care and aromatherapy.
In online cosmetics stores and pharmacies, essential oils can be bought at a variety of prices – from 100 rubles to several thousand. For example, rose oil can cost both 250 rubles and 8,000 rubles. How to understand that in front of you is a real organic product, and not a “dummy"?
Essential oils are obtained by steam distillation, extraction or pressing. This production is expensive and raw materials. For example, to make 10 ml of neroli oil, 20 kg of orange blossoms are needed. It takes 4 tons of petals to get 1 liter of rose oil. Of course, steam distillation and pressing are carried out using special machines. But some organic brands still use hand pressing to produce high quality oils.
It turns out that with any method of processing raw materials, organic oil cannot be cheap. Why, then, on sale can you stumble upon inexpensive oil of sandalwood, cedar, neroli or lavender? Moreover, the word “natural” is often found on their labels.
Does this mean that the manufacturer is insidiously misleading you? No, he is rather delicately silent about the method of obtaining oil. And he resorts to maceration – mixing the leaves and flowers of the plant with inexpensive vegetable oil. Such an oil is not 100% essential: it is usually called cosmetic. And if the package modestly says “essential oil” without indicating the notorious 100% and it costs suspiciously cheap, most likely, you have a maceration product in front of you.
But you should not be afraid of such an oil: just its effectiveness in skin care and aromatherapy will be somewhat lower. Essential oils are the most concentrated products. Even for adding to the bath, 3-5 drops of oil are enough, and for mixing with a cream or a homemade face mask – no more than 1-2 drops, and even then, provided there is no allergy.
But synthetic oils are the very “dummy” that we talked about above. In the composition – an inexpensive solvent (often toxic) and flavoring. Such "oils" are cheap and have a flavor similar to the original oil. Chemical compounds give it to them: for example, benzyl acetate smells like jasmine, diphenyl ether smells like geranium, and linalool acetate smells like lavender. Many of these flavors depress the human immune system and harm his health in other ways. What else distinguishes harmful synthetic oil, besides the low price, because of which it can be easily confused with macerates?
Strong smell
Synthetic compounds that give the desired flavor to the oil smell too bright. Many natural essential oils (such as cedar or elemi) have little to no smell at all. Flower-scented chemical fragrances are the easiest to spot: they smell very sweet and annoyingly loud.
Transparent bottle
Plastic or glass – there is not much difference. If the oil is not stored in dark bottles, they quickly oxidize and lose their beneficial qualities. If the manufacturer is not afraid of sunlight hitting the oil, then there is no doubt about its poor quality.
The presence of strange components in the composition
If the packaging says a composition that contains something other than natural oil, then chemical ingredients were used to produce it. Synthetic oils need impurities, additives, and flavors to make them more like organic oils. Unfortunately, this does not give them those magical beneficial properties that real esters of flowers and plants have!