Essential oils: Processing techniques

How do we get our essential oils? There are as many techniques, it seems, as there are types of essential oils! PHYSICAL METHODSINFUSION: Soaking the plants in vegetable oil, water, alcohol, or other solvent. This is done for products like calendula, St John’s Wort, and arnica. (This is something we can do at home, but...

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Essential oils: Orange in surfactant based products

I love using orange essential oil in my rinse off products, especially shampoo, because it’s a fantastic essential oil for degreasing oily hair and skin. But it is really awesome for hand cleansers, especially when we’ve been making products and need to get the oils off our skin! I tend to use my orange essential...

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Essential oils: Folded oils and phototoxicity of citrus essential oils

What the heck does folded mean when it comes to essential oils? Folded oils tend to be citrus based oils – orange, grapefruit, lime, lemon – and we see them as 5X or 10X folded. Folded essential oils are those that have been further distilled and concentrated to create a more concentrated, and usually stronger...

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Essential oils: Orange

Orange essential oil can be found in so many places because it’s inexpensive and it smells nice. It comes from the peels of oranges that have enjoyed some other use – juice, flavouring, and so on – What do we find in orange oil? The main compound found in orange oil – about 90% of...

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The chemistry of essential oils: Terpenes revisited

This post was originally written on December 30, 2010, but I’ve added and updated it!  So what the heck are terpenes? Terpenes are organic compounds, the major building blocks within nearly every living creature. For instance, steroids are derivatives of the triterpene squalene. (Quote from Wikipedia .) They are derived from units of isoprene (that’s the...

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