Essential Oil Info

Eden Botanicals offers some of the highest quality wholesale essential oils in the business – our specialty is offering the best quality, pure essential oils available at fair and reasonable pricing. What this means to our customers is that they are assured that they will be getting excellent quality essential oils at pricing that is typically less than many of our competitors. The price difference that you may see if you compare some retail sellers of essential oils and Eden Botanicals is not reflective of quality. Rather it is in the mark-up or the percentage increase in price at which the bulk essential oils are sold after being poured into small bottles for their customers. We sell wholesale essential oils in bulk packaging (amber essential oils bottles with full and proper labeling) in all sizes, rather than just in small bottles. This allows us to serve the home-buying end user looking for healing oils (therapeutic grade essential oils) and to also serve large corporate customers looking for larger quantities of bulk essential oils for a whole variety of uses and purposes.

Whatever your intended use, these highly concentrated healing oils (therapeutic grade essential oils) and natural raw materials (absolutes, essential oils, and specialty oils) for the natural perfume industry, they will delight you and serve the purposes for which you intend them. Essential oil uses are varied and many – body care product manufacture, aromatherapy and healing oil needs, and production of natural perfumes for the healing of emotions or increasing sensual delights, among others.

Highly aromatic substances, essential oils – known as essences (from the original idea of the essence or “spirit” of the plant) – are produced in the cells of aromatic plants and are held in specialized glands or cells. These essences are scientifically termed secondary metabolites, whereas they are commonly called essential oils when they are released from the plants through distillation or other extraction techniques. It is interesting to note that many essential oils are actually comprised of hundreds of individual chemical constituents, and that many of them may not be aromatic at all. Also, when learning about the chemistry of essential oils, you will find that many constituents are found in relatively large proportions and often in many different essential oils from a whole variety of plant species. For instance, we often see linalool (aka linalol), limonene, geranial, pinene, etc. in many essential oils obtained from plants of very diverse plant families.

While steam distillation is the most common method used to extract pure essential oils, there are many other methods. Most notably we find that many citrus peel essential oils, such as lemon, orange, grapefruit, tangerine, etc., are expressed rather than distilled. Expressed essential oils from citrus peels are produced by an easy method of collecting and concentrating the essential oil – the peels are collected, washed and then pressed. The resulting liquid is separated into the essential oil and water fractions. Sometimes these expressed citrus peel essential oils are distilled and perhaps redistilled to create citrus essential oils with different properties that can be applied to many different uses.

Other methods used to create pure essential oils are dry or vacuum distillation, molecular distillation, hydro (or water distillation) or water / steam distillation (a combination of steam and water distillation). Please see our pure essential oil / therapeutic grade essential oil web page for more information on the processes used to extract these wonderful aromatic and healing oils from nature’s treasure chest.

For a plant, the pure essential oil contained in the plant’s tissues and released into the air has multiple uses. The plant uses these essential oils to attract insects to help with pollination, or repel insects and animals to keep them from being eaten, for protection against disease or healing of wounds, or for the healing of a disease process that has already begun, etc. Some researchers have even theorized that one of the many uses for which plants create essential oils is to attract humans to use and subsequently propagate the plants for their ability to heal or provide medicine, etc. (for instance, see writings by Michael Pollan). In return for the plants providing useful healing agents, flavoring materials, incense, etc. in the form of the aromatic oils (so the theory goes), the plants benefit from the propagation, planting and care that humans provide. While this may seem far-fetched to some, is it really that different than a plant’s ability to attract insects in order to achieve pollination of its flowers?

For humans, essential oils derived from plants have multiple purposes that range from olfactory delight, mood transformations, and flavoring of foods and beverages to simple and astounding restorations in physical and emotional well-being.

Essential oils are volatile oils that evaporate and oxidize rapidly when exposed to the air. Essential oils also deteriorate when exposed to light and heat, thus the necessity to keep them from heat and in dark, tightly sealed glass containers with as little as possible head (air) space inside the container. And contrary to their designation as oils, they are often times light and non-greasy (and in the scientific sense they are not “oils” at all).

Although the distillation method is the most well known technique for extracting essential oils from plants, there are several other methods that are used to remove and concentrate the aromatic constituents from plant materials. Here at Eden Botanicals we have embraced these alternate methods for their ability to capture unique aromas and natural scents as well as the therapeutic characteristics contained in the plants’ essence.

Please enjoy and respect these wonderful gifts of nature.

Happy blending!

Will Lapaz, Owner

Eden Botanicals