WEDNESDAY MATERIALS: ABSOLUTES VS ESSENTIAL OILS

I’m not sure that everyone who enjoys perfume is clear about the difference between an essential oil and an absolute, partly because the distinction often gets lost in the listing of notes, the hype, and the fact that there are vendors who sell “essential oils” purported to be from materials that do not lend themselves to the distillation of oils. If the price you see for “frangipani absolute” is absurdly cheap, what you would be buying is neither an essential oil nor an absolute. Re-sellers may not even be aware of this issue, perpetuating it among the users of materials for perfume and aromatherapy. There’s nothing wrong with a synthetic fragrance oil meant to smell like frangipani, in fact, it might smell more realistic than the natural extractions, but if that’s what it is, it should be labeled as such.

Essential oils are steam-distilled or cold-pressed. Any material that contains a lot of oil, like citrus peels, can be cold-pressed. You’ve probably done this accidentally while peeling an orange and getting the oil on your hands. You could even do cold-pressing at home as a demonstration or experiment if you have enough citrus peels and a separatory funnel to remove the water-based layer or are willing to skim the oil off the top. For materials that contain a smaller ratio of oil to other materials, steam distillation heats the plant material, and the distillate is condensed and collected. Generally the oils are more volatile than the water, but both will come out of the condenser during the course of distillation. In this method, too, there is an oil layer and an aqueous layer, which must be separated. The aqueous layer is sometimes sold as a “hydrosol”. It generally contains a small quantity of aromatic molecules, so can be used in various cosmetic applications.

As I mentioned in my last Wednesday post, some materials do not lend themselves to steam distillation. These include many types of flowers. Other materials, like lavender, can be steam-distilled to produce an essential oil or extracted to produce an absolute. Generally, the essential oil will smell different from the absolute because a different subset of molecules is extracted by each method. In many cases the absolute (or other type of extract) will smell more like the natural material. The choice of which to use in perfumery depends on the desired scent properties, price, availability, and so on. Absolutes are almost always more expensive than essential oils, assuming both are available, but the extra expense may be worth it if the material is featured in the composition and a naturalistic scent is desired. And sometimes a synthetic reconstruction does the trick.

[Top and bottom photos are3 mine, orange peel photo from a commercial website] 

FOOD, FRAGRANCE MATERIALS, AND THE FUTURE

Living in the dense, damp, obscenely green Shangri-La of our sheltering mini-rainforest, it’s hard to imagine that all is not right with the world.  However, all too often these days I read articles like this one, describing how we humans are creating conditions that will lead to a future crisis, probably within our own lifetimes, or at least those of our children, sending humanity the way of the dinosaurs in the worst case scenario, or into some chaotic end-of-the-world bad science fiction movie scenario in the best case.

The polar caps and glaciers are melting. The last time I flew over Greenland, most of the land was brown instead of white as it used to be, so I’ve seen the evidence with my own eyes. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reportedly reached the highest level since humans have been on this planet, based on what current science can estimate from the historical record. The article I read this morning predicted that there will eventually be a massive collapse of our food supply due to drought, crop disease, and other factors.

These predictions are not bad science fiction, they are evidence-based and credible. Food is pretty low on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, so a struggle to obtain food would presumably eliminate most higher-level activities, including perfume-making. On second thought, maybe perfume would become more important, in order to mask the unpleasant odors of life in a chaotic society. Spices could once again be an important currency, with wars fought over them. Highly spiced food is more satisfying than bland food, so people could learn to eat less and not miss the vast amounts of tasteless, mass-produced calories that are currently consumed in the US.

Unfortunately, spices and natural perfume materials depend on the same agricultural conditions as food crops, so the factors that lead to disruption of food production would simultaneously lead to disruption of fragrance material production. In fact that is happening now. Sandalwood, rosewood, and agarwood are just about gone. They’re being farmed to some extent, but it’s a slow process, and one that could not be sustained in the face of major alterations in the world’s climate.

I don’t know what the solution to the problem is, and I’m not even sure there is one at this point other than to let nature take its course and restore homeostasis to the earth through means that will be, at the very least, unpleasant to humans. What each of us can do, in our own small way, is to think before engaging in unnecessary use of resources and the accompanying depletion and/or pollution of the environment.

The most egregious example I’ve seen recently was a mother in our neighborhood who parked her hulk of an SUV by the school bus stop, motor running, waited for her child to arrive, and drove him less than 200 meters to their house. I stopped my run to watch the unfolding of this real-life scene that would have been unbelievable if presented as a comedy skit. If people would stop engaging in this sort of absurdly lazy behavior, it would at least be a start in the right direction. 

[Photos of Texas dust storm and dead corn adapted from Wikimedia]