Natural Variations

Natural Variations
Manufacturers of cosmetics, fragrances and personal care products go to great lengths to create
products that remain consistent in their appearance, fragrance, colour and feel.  Of course,
this is one reason for the use of strong synthetic emulsifiers, preservatives, fragrances, synthetic
oils and dyes. Such products may not be of any real value for your skin, for example, but they
are consistent – and this is what we as consumers have come to expect.
When we consider using fully natural products, we now find that consistency in a number of
areas can vary quite a bit.
As a summary:
Fragrance variation
As a professional aromatherapy supplier, we find that odour acceptance can be a major issue for
our customers. Most of us do not have a gas chromatography machine at home to test for
authenticity, so checking the fragrance of an essential oil is a often a major method of “quality
control” by customers.
Natural essential oils will often vary a small amount in aroma from each harvest. Or there
may be a change due to using a different steam distillation unit. We accept these
variations – they are simply natural – and we do fully test all our oils for authenticity. If the
aroma varied dramatically for any reason, we would reject the batch.
In the flavour and fragrance industry (and unfortunately what too often ends up offered as so called
Aromatherapy oils), essential oils and synthetic aroma chemicals are routinely blended
together to create a consistent acceptable fragrance and a lower cost product.
Often, people are more used to the aroma of these commercial adulterated oils instead of the
real thing.
As an interesting example, some hundreds of participants in seminars have been tested with a blind
odour evaluation test. Using Lavender essential oil as an example, the people evaluated three
samples by odour alone – a real wild harvested True Lavender, a Lavandin Super Acetate clone
and a very inexpensive Lavender blend of Lavandins and synthetic aroma chemicals.
On average, 50% of people judged the fake Lavender, as the “real Lavender” and about 30%
of the people felt the real wild harvested True Lavender (as Lavender as Lavender can be!)
was the adulterated Lavender blend.
In summary, we have to be careful about only trusting our nose!