Medicinal aromatherapy has amazing health-supportive potential. It can help you look and feel younger and more alive, enhancing your life and sense of well-being in many ways. But, in order for it to work, you need to use quality oils.
About 98% of essential oils produced in the world today are not intended for serious aromatherapy; they're produced for the perfume/cosmetic or food industries. Yet, marketers will bottle these lower quality oils and sell them as aromatherapy products. If you attempt anything more than recreational aromatherapy with any of these oils, you're likely to be very disappointed.
Therapeutic-grade oil
Great care is taken, every step of the way, to ensure that you always have access to the finest oils in the world.Most essential oils produced today are not intended for aromatherapy. Various short-cuts and bad practices in production seriously compromise the quality of the oils.
A therapeutic-grade essential oil is one that is both complete in its chemical constituents, giving it a rich, deep aroma, and kinetically alive and able to raise the frequency of the human body, restoring balance and normal function to weak body systems. This is important, because the oil's fragrance, frequency and chemistry all contribute to its unique therapeutic effects.
Therapeutic-grade oil
The problem here is that these aromatic compounds are quite fragile, and not easily extracted from the plant material. This means that proper production of essential oils takes a lot of understanding of the oil, and the willingness to invest the necessary time and expense to do the job right. Species selection is very important, since different varieties of plants produce different qualities of essential oils. Only those cultivars that produce the highest quality essential oil should be selected.
Plants should be grown on virgin land, uncontaminated by chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides or herbicides. The plant materials must be kept free of agrochemicals, since these can react with the essential oil during distillation, and produce toxic compounds. And, because many pesticides are oil-soluble, they can also mix into the essential oil. If these oils are diffused or topically applied, the toxic chemicals in the oils are carried into the body with potentially devastating results.
Plant materials should also be grown away from pollution sources such as nuclear plants, factories, interstates, highways or heavily populated cities, if possible. Also, the soil should be conditioned with an advanced mix of enzymes, trace minerals, and organic bio-solids, since plants lacking in certain minerals and nutrients yield oils low in therapeutic value.
Land and crops should be watered with reservoir or watershed water. Mountain stream water is best, because of its purity and high mineral content. Municipality treated water, or secondary runoff water from residential and commercial areas, can introduce undesirable chemicals and residues into the plant and its essential oil.
Essential oils can be extracted from the plant by a variety of methods, including solvent extraction, carbon dioxide extraction and steam distillation. Steam distillation is one of the most common, and has several advantages over the other methods.
However, distillation is as much a science as it is an art, and subtle differences in distillation equipment and processing conditions can translate into huge differences in essential oil quality.