Essential Oils and Fragrance Oils are NOT the Same

curlytea (25)in #diy • 7 years ago

(This is my content from my website at curlytea.com)

Never use Essential oils the way you use Fragrance oils. Sorry to start off so blunt but it’s important that everyone understands that there’s a world of difference between essential oils and fragrance oils.

Essential oils are the concentrations of volatile aromas made from plant materials. It’s the result of either the distillation process or the cold-pressed method. Because of their potency, essential oils are typically used at lower percentages than regular fragrance oil because they can cause a negative reaction on the skin.

Fragrance oils, on the other hand, are mostly developed in a lab by combining synthetic chemicals to create a certain scent. They are usually diluted in carrier ingredients like mineral oil or propylene glycol, according to online sources. Fragrance oils are also much less expensive than essential oils.

So, which one is for you?

People wonder which essential oils are good to achieve a certain aroma, and how they can get a desired level of scent while using essential oils.

The problem with relying on essential oils for scent is that some of them aren’t quite potent enough to be used the way fragrance oils are used. Each essential oil has a max usage rate, which may not be enough to create those gorgeous, highly fragrant aromas we’re used to.

That highly fragrant, knock-out scent we all love from places like Bath and Body Works (BBW), Victoria Secret, and Yankee Candle are often created with lab-produced fragrance oils. If you want to dupe those aromas, a quick way to start is to find your fave fragrance company and look for what is known as a “___ type”.

At NaturesGardenCandles.com (NGC), you can search for your fave Bath and Body Works scent and see if they stock a “type”, which is a close dupe of that scent.

For example, NGC sells a “White Tea & Ginger Type” fragrance oil that some say gives a similar scent to BBW’s White Tea & Ginger lotion.

Another example is WellingtonFragrance.com which sells a “Dark Kiss BBW Type” fragrance oil that smells like the Dark Kiss lotion at BBW. Sometimes companies will flat-out tell you in the description: look for the initials “BBW” in the title.

All of these cost significantly less that it would cost to try to mimic the complex synthetic scents using essential oils.

As a sidenote to this discussion, you have to remember that sometimes certain products on the market include essential oils as little more than a marketing tool to help increase the sales of a product. It’s been said that certain companies add a tiny amount of Lavender ESSENTIAL oil, for example, while relying on Lavender FRAGRANCE oil to create the potent aroma of Lavender.

<< Usage Rates in Real Terms >>

The usage rates for essential oils and fragrance oils are different. Let’s look at a quick example of the usage rate differences between Grapefruit ESSENTIAL oil and Grapefruit FRAGRANCE oil.

Using the Fragrance Calculator at BrambleBerry.com, you’ll notice that to scent 8 ounces of product, they recommend using 2.27 grams of Grapefruit ESSENTIAL oil for a “medium” scent and 3.4 grams for a “strong” scent.