Tag Archives: quality of essential oils

Ayurvedic Essential Oils

What Should You Know Before Purchasing Ayurvedic Essential Oils?


Ayurveda is a spectacular science blended with nature to treat human beings who are an absolute part of nature. There are numerous ways in which Ayurveda treats illnesses and aims at bringing in total harmony between the mind and body. The brilliant healing system of Ayurveda has eight comprehensive branches that cover every single sickness related with mankind. This ancient therapeutic methodology suggests the use of herbs, Ayurvedic essential oils extracted from plants, taking up a balanced diet, regular physical exercises, and yoga for rejuvenation and meditation for strengthening your mental power from within.

Ayurveda is completely safe but any medicine besides being natural should be taken only after a proper consultation with your Ayurvedic practitioner. You must be precautious and aware of certain essential things before purchasing Ayurvedic essential oils. Those vital things are:

  1. Know what you are actually buying: Essential oils generally mean that they carry the typical essence and aroma from the plants they are extracted. These highly concentrated oils have impulsive aroma compounds with a historical use in Ayurveda for more than 5000 years in the treatment and prevention of innumerable health conditions and had recently given the name ‘Aromatherapy’. Essential oils have therapeutic values and all you need to know initially is the actual reason for purchasing the oil. Which particular illness you are going to treat or what are the ways in which you are going to use it? Everything needs to have an answer before choosing the right oil for your class.
  2. Keep your confusions at bay: Try to understand the difference between essential oils, fragrance oils, synthetic oils and perfume oils. All are different from each other and except essential oils; all the other three oils have artificial, chemical and synthetic elements added to them to bring in the real effect. Peeping slightly into the chemistry of essential oils will help you know how it affects your robustness and well-being. Synthetic elements can also cause adverse health conditions.
  3. Look for the container in which it is stored: Essential oils are highly concentrated and have the potential to degrade plastic containers or containers with rubber seals. Do not purchase essential oils in clear, transparent bottles as they can be spoiled by the reflection of light.
  4. Take time to test your essential oils: You can test the purity of your essential oils by yourselves by placing a drop of oil on a paper. Essential oils evaporate rapidly without leaving any kind of oily marks behind. If you see an oily mark it is a clear sign that your essential oil is not pure and has vegetable oils added to it.
  5. Purchase it from a reliable company: Essential oils are trusted to be the life-saving oils and any adulteration or low quality oil can have off-putting effects on your body. To avoid this, always purchase your Ayurvedic essential oils from a trustworthy company that care for its customers and does not comprise its integrity at any cost. You can get a reference from your friends or search for best companies approved by FDA, ISO and other quality certifications that often determine and assure you on the quality of essential oils.
  6. Look for the label information: Look for the information on the label and try identifying the words on it. Flawless and high quality essential oils will most of the times have words like ‘Pure’, ‘Genuine’, ‘Finest quality’ etc, with the botanical name and the country of origin, confirming that you are purchasing the right oil that you wanted to buy.

You don’t need to be an expert in testing the quality of essential oils that you buy but being aware of these quintessential things will certainly save your head from nonconstructive health effects.

Thought for the day:

It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.

                                                                                        -Mahatma Gandhi

Suggested Reading:

  1. Essential Oils Integrative Medical Guide by D. Gary Young
  2. Essential Oil Safety: A Guide for Health Care Professionals by Robert Tisserand, Tony Balacs

Reference Links:

  1. Essential oils by Wikipedia
  2. How Do I determine the Quality of essential oils? By University of Minnesota
  3. Essential Oil Chemistry by Bio Spiritual Energy Healing
Aromatherapy Facts, Blending Essential Oils

Quality vs Purity of essential oils: Where lies the difference?


Essential oils ought to be pure to be therapeutic and beneficial for medicinal or healing purposes. But most of the oils that are projected to be pure are not actually pure. Holistic aromatherapy measures an oil by its purity, the ratio of natural constituents present in it. Some oils can be pure and yet be of poor quality. How can this happen? This can happen if pure essential oils are tampered with other natural or synthetic constituents to make them serve a particular purpose, therapeutic or otherwise. This article will help you analyze in depth about the purity and quality of essential oils and how they can influence the therapeutic quality of their usage.

Purity of essential oils: Do not imagine that all the essential oils you come in contact with are pristine. Most of the oils are adulterated during various kinds of processes – extraction, distillation and packaging.  Essential oils’ purity is measured by the optimum ratio of natural constituents present in them. Since oils are distilled for various other purposes like home fragrancing, cosmetics, personal healing and other things, most of them are tampered with many other constituents. This is because manufacturers want what are called standardized oils. Any oil, extracted directly from plant substances, carries natural constituents in different ratios. No two extracted oils of the same plant species, from the same region, are the same. Each plant yields oil that is different in some way or the other from its neighbor. Since uniformity is required in the manufacture of food or perfume products, companies use only essential oils that are standardized and do not vary from shipment to shipment.

Standardization of essential oils: Standardized oils are not pure oils. Sellers standardize oils only to suit the needs of buyers and hence, have several constituents removed/added to pure oils. Peppermint oil is used in the manufacture of chewing gums, ice creams and candies. The oil is used as a flavoring by food and candy manufacturers. Since companies should produce Peppermint-flavored products that have a consistent aroma, intensity or taste, manufacturers buy only standardized Peppermint oils.

Standardization process is not suitable for use in therapeutic aromatherapy. Addition or removal of constituents may make oils impure, adulterated and un-therapeutic. Some manufacturers may adulterate oils to cheat buyers and find profits. Japanese Yuzu essential oil seems to be a combination of Grapefruit and Mandarin. Sellers may use this trait of Yuzu and blend Grapefruit and Mandarin essential oils, and sell it as the costly Yuzu oil. Similarly, Patchouli oil can be extended with the addition of Cedarwood and Lavender oil can be tampered with linalyl acetate.

Quality of essential oils: The aroma and exact percentage of essential oils of each natural constituent contribute to the quality of the oil. Several other factors which contribute to an oil’s quality are – quality of soil in which the plant is grown, temperature of the region, weather/climatic changes/annual amount of rainfall  in which plant is grown, altitude of plant life, distilled part of plant, distillation process, time gap between harvest of plant and its distillation, storage of oil after extraction, type of distillation equipment used etc.
Some of the ways in which essential oils can be adulterated and which can in turn, affect their quality: blending pure oils with less expensive oils; adding synthetics to increase or maintain a particular aroma; extending oils by mixing bad carrier oils; blending an oil of higher quality with one of lower quality and so on. To ensure that you use only oils of good quality, check with your buyer on the soil, region and distillation process of the plants from which the oils are extracted and on the optimum ratio of the natural constituents of the oil.