How to Recognize and Work with
Clinical Quality Essential Oils
There are 4 general types of essential oils:
- Recreational fragrance oils for things like candles, perfume, household products, personal-care products and potpourri. Now, if you're considering using a lower quality or lower price essential oils for these projects. Consider also that your body still absorbs into the blood, what you put on your skin. That what you smell, your inhaling, and it goes to the brain. Do you really want to risk taking in synthetic's or adulterated or contaminated essential oils?
- Food flavoring oils for things like chewing gum, sodas (Coca Cola for one), and toothpaste among many products. Once again, taking essential oils in internally, there is a quality control called GRAS (Generally Regarded as Safe) for ingestion by FDA. LorAnn is a candy making essential oils flavoring. And again, knowing your essential oils are of the purest quality when you're cooking with them, or making drinks, taking internally in a capsule, you don't want synthetic's or taking a chance on poor quality oils, or the "word" of the company on their purity.
- So-Called "Certified oils" from various marketing companies that claim therapeutic value but may not provide consistent quality. Unfortunately Integrity is not the top standard for most companies, the $ is. Certified Therapeutic is a trade mark, and therapeutic grade is a marketing term without science. Clinical grade actually has to meet the highest standards set by clinical studies through International Research Institutions using essential oils. PubMed will have near 24,000 EO studies. Before 2014, Clinical grade oils were generally purchased through France only, and for clinical research or medical uses in France mainly.
- Essential Oils consistently suited for professional, medicinal, and clinical use. This will be covered next. Yes there is a huge difference. Yes there is a true clinical grade now available to the general public as of 2014. There are 2 areas that clinical-grade essential oil users need to consider: Quality and development. (We'll approach both of these in the next 2 Blogs)
Essential oil purity can not be overstated. Most oils on the market are manipulated for consistency of scent or to pad the company's pockets $, rather than produced to use in aromatherapy applications. Even though they are marketed as safe to use, or recommended in therapeutic applications, it's simply marketing hype. About 98% of essential oils today are used in the perfume or food industries or to add scents to candles, soaps, other household care items. Unfortunately, even those intended for therapeutic application are frequently diluted or adulterated by unscrupulous traders to increase profitability, control consistency and create oils that smell better. A significant number of essential oil traders (or brokers) taint their oils with cheaper -- but similar -- oils, isolated synthetic compounds, essential oils of similar species, or less expensive parts of the same plant. This is done to produce a more consistent taste and smell, but ultimately, to generate more profits for the trader.
Some common adulteration's include synthetic menthol added to peppermint oil, synthetic phenyl ethyl alcohol added to rose otto, adding lavandin to lavender, diluting citronella with lemongrass, or using cinnamon leaf instead of bark.
Synthetic compounds are less expensive and offer greater consistency in compound profile that cannot be achieved in natural plants. Natural compounds are based on harvest time, growing type, geographic region, soil quality, altitude, weather, cultivation practices, and water quality. It's amazing how a profile can change based on these factors. If an oil smells different than the natural scent of a plant, this shows the constituents of the oil have been altered.
Some methods found in adulterating essential oils, such as Lavender to smell better. After distilling the plant material, they add a synthetic version of a compound that is naturally found in lavender, such as linalool or linalyl acetate. It improves the fragrance of the oil, offers no improvement in the therapeutic value of the oil -- in fact, quite the opposite. It augments the smell and places the natural constituents found in the oil out of balance.
Another common adulteration is wintergreen oil. Wintergreen plants are naturally high in methyl salicylate at about 95%. However, many GCMS tests found to contain 100% methyl salicylate, which is not possible in nature. It tells us that the oil has been manipulated and adulterated with synthetic methyl salicylate. Knowing how to read GCMS tests is important.
Dangers of Synthetic or Adulterated Essential Oils
While the synthetic or adulterated essential oils (claiming to be pure), may produce results in a short term, long term use may produce allergies, headaches, and chemical sensitivities, and result in body toxicity. Toxins like synthetically created in a lab, are harmful to the body. Unfortunately, people trying to remove toxins from their everyday and home products, soaps, personal care products, and more. Yet by using an impure essential oil, such as those mentioned above, they are inviting these chemicals and toxins into their bodies. Counter-intuitive, that a "health product" would contain harmful ingredients that can be devastating to your health.
- A company that has expertise in the distillation process and innovative distillation equipment
- A company that has published essential oils research in scientific journals and takes a clinical approach to essential oil development
- A company that is personally involved in the farming and cultivation process through the inspection of supplier farms by a qualified expert. This does not mean they own their own farms, who are they accountable to then? It means they have a relationship with the supplier farms around the world, inspections by an expert.
- A company that verifies purity with their own laboratories, third-party testing facilities that specialize in testing essential oils (not all labs are capable of testing with all the right equipment). And educated scientists to read and interpret test results.
- A company with oils that smell like the natural plants and whose single oils vary in aroma from batch to batch due to inherent variations in plants. (Slight variations in the smell of each batch of oil is a good indication that Mother Nature has created the essential oil and not a lab. This trait is desirable and normal; whereas if your lavender oil smells always exactly the same, it could be an indication that the oil is adulterated.)
- A company that is willing to share results from the tests their essential oils have undergone to ensure purity and authenticity, for the specific batch of oil you have purchased. if a company is not willing to share this information, you are placing blind faith in them, and may very well be using a product that doesn't meet the high quality standards required for therapeutic and safe use.
- Essential oils distilled from organically grown plants are greatly preferred, essential oils labeled as organic may have been contaminated during processing, improperly distilled, or extracted using chemicals or solvents.
- Pure or even wild-crafted doesn't mean the highest quality. Pure doesn't mean 100% in the bottle, it's an accepted amount and additional synthetics or lesser quality can be added as well.
- Everything in Nature, natural, wild-crafted doesn't always mean it's safe. Consider simply poison ivy, natural yes, safe no.
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