Many websites and blogs provide information on what to look for on the label of an essential oil to ensure its quality. An essential oil must be botanically and biochemically defined or chemotyped, must display the Latin name of the plant to avoid any confusion, a DLUO, a batch number for traceability and so on. All this is true and very often quoted.
What is much less so, however, and yet crucial when it comes to the quality of an essential oil, and what we’ll be focusing on in this article, concerns the methods used in its manufacture.
What is a quality essential oil?
A quality essential oil is first and foremost extracted from a quality plant. This may seem obvious, but it’s worth pointing out that a high-quality plant can, if carefully cultivated, harvested and distilled, produce a high-quality essential oil. On the other hand, a poor-quality plant – whether it has been carelessly cultivated, harvested too early or too late, mistreated during harvesting, improperly stored or stored too long while awaiting distillation – will not yield a high-quality essential oil.
So what is a quality plant?
To obtain a high-quality essential oil, the minimum requirement is that the plant distilled be organic or wild-growing. The distillation process extracts and concentrates the molecules present in the plant into the essential oil without distinction. As a result, the pesticides used to grow plants in conventional agriculture may be present in significant concentrations. When turning to aromatherapy for self-care, it is therefore essential to choose products free from such toxic products, and therefore to choose organic essential oils.
Organic plants as a minimum, but then what?
A quality plant has been treated with gentleness and care, whether planted, grown or harvested. As is often the case, the method of production and the attention paid to the plant will have enormous consequences in the virtues conferred on its user. At Boèmia, plants are grown with care, harvested by hand and conscientiously. Harvesting by hand minimizes the stress caused to the plant. A stress which, with mechanized harvesting, results in the secretion and dispersion of the most subtle and volatile molecules contained in aromatic plants. To extract a high-quality, subtle essential oil, it is therefore important to harvest plants by hand, taking care to minimize stress.
To illustrate this argument, which may seem surprising, we invite you to search for and watch two videos: one of a lavender harvester in action to see how badly the plant is mistreated, and one of a manual harvest where the plant is respected.
Distillation of quality essential oils
Once you have high-quality plants, carefully cultivated and harvested by hand at full maturity, you need to distill them to extract the best possible essential oil. Once again, the process and the care taken at this decisive stage of production will play key roles in the quality of the essential oil extracted.
Still material
At Boèmia, as with many small-scale producers, distillation takes place in traditional small-capacity copper stills. Used for centuries to extract essential oils, copper is now being rejected by manufacturers in favor of stainless steel. Stainless steel offers a number of advantages: it is sturdy, making it possible to build large, solid vats; it is easy to maintain; and, above all, it is virtually inert, meaning that it exchanges almost nothing chemically with the plant during distillation. Thanks to this property, it has become widely used in the chemical and food industries.
Copper, for its part, is mechanically fragile and difficult to maintain, as it oxidizes. On the other hand, it is an excellent heat conductor and exchanges chemically and intensely with the plant during distillation. It has been used for centuries in perfumery to enhance the aromas of jams, fine spirits and fine cuisine. In fact, it is still favored by artisans of taste, notably gourmet restaurants. Distillation in copper gives the extracted essential oils much warmer, more enveloping, rounded and subtle fragrances than stainless steel. To the olfactory senses, the material lends an obvious extra soul to the essential oils extracted in contact with it.
If you’re looking for quality essential oils whose olfaction transports you to the heart of the plant, chances are you’ll be more receptive to a product extracted from copper than from stainless steel. There’s a lot more to be said about the art of distillation to obtain the best possible organic essential oils, and I invite you to read our article on distillation.
The intention behind the bottle
As opposed to a synthetic molecule produced in a laboratory, an essential oil is a product derived from a plant that has grown in contact with the four elements of earth, air, rainwater and sunlight. It is therefore a living product. The intention behind the bottle is therefore of the utmost importance in determining the
Where to find and buy the best organic essential oils in the field?
In the field, you’re more likely to find quality organic essential oils in a herbalist’s shop or organic food store than in a hard discounter or pharmacy where the brands are the same and come from large laboratories.
You can also find quality organic essential oils at farmers’ markets and stores.
We also invite you to visit our essential oil distilleries in the same way you would visit a wine cellar. Meeting the producer and talking with him or her will help you understand the intention and measure the work that goes into each little bottle.
Where to find and buy the best essential oils on the Internet?
On the Internet, hundreds of essential oil websites promise you the best quality in the world at ever-lower prices. Most of the people behind these shop windows have never picked, grown or even distilled a single plant. They tell you that they travel the world to find the best organic essential oils. Beware: in reality, you’re more likely to come across low-quality essential oils bought in bulk on foreign markets.
Choose your oils from a producer like Boèmia and take an interest in their values and production methods.
