76- How Are Essential Oils Made

31 Nov 2022

Very often, what we see off the shelves, in the malls, are the final perfume product. But what comes before this? Perfume making starts with the fragrance oil mixture in perfumes.
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 So, this article will to explain the concepts behind the techniques utilized in making fragrance oils and these techniques are the Distillation, maceration, Expression, and “Enfleurage”.

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Distillation

Principle: Distillation is a separation technique used to isolate components of a mixture by heating and changing the phase of the components (liquid to gas); as different substances have different boiling points.
To obtain the pure fragrance end product, the evaporated pure fragrance gas condenses and the condensed droplets is collected in another flask, yielding the pure fragrance product.

Pre-condition: The initial crude fragrance liquid mixture before distillation, contains unwanted substances. Therefore, to obtain the pure fragrance product, knowing the pure fragrance’s boiling point can help to apply the correct amount heat which aids in evaporating the pure substance.
The most common type of distillation used to separate fragrance mixtures is steam distillation

Maceration
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Principle: Maceration is an extraction method that is conducted by soaking freshly picked or dried plants in a solvent (oil, water or alcohol), in an air-tight container at ambient temperature and for a period of time.
After the plant is macerated, the end fragrance product can be obtained through filtration.

Pre-condition: Before undergoing the maceration process, the plant to be soaked by be cleaned and removed of unwanted impurities such as dirt, soil, stones, to ensure the purity of the fragrance product yielded after maceration.

Size: The plant size should not be too large or too fine. Large sizes may limit solvent penetration into the plant, while if the sizes are too small or powdered, much of the initial existing essential oil in the plant would be lost, which will lower the fragrance product yield. Furthermore, powdered plant will cause further significant lost in yield during the filtration process.

Solvent: The solvent used should match the solubility and chemical nature of the desired fragrance substance in the plant. Typically, alcohol is used as the solvent to extract the key active ingredients in the plant due to its good abilities too extract both lipophilic and hydrophilic substances. When one uses other solvents such as water or vegetable oil, they can only extract hydrophilic and lipophilic components respectively.

Expression

Principle: This method is a manual extraction method mainly used for only citrus fruits, where their peels are squeezed, pressed, or compressed.
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After the expression process, the extracted substance is subjected to centrifuge to decanted to yield the fragrance oil.
Typically, citrus fruits such as lemon, lime, orange, grapefruit and bergamots are used.

Enfleurage

This method is applied with the use of petals or whole flowers. These blooms are then submerged in animal lard to allow the flowers’ fragrance to diffuse into the animal lard over one to three days. This process can be repeated to achieve the desired aroma concentration.

After these repeated processes, ethyl alcohol is utilized to wash or soak it, and the final fragrance absolute can be obtained after the alcohol has evaporated. 

To End Off,

I hope that these explanations have shed light and helped you gained more understanding towards how fragrance oils are made which in turn could be used to make perfumes and other more complex fragrances.
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If you are interested to personalize your very own perfume using fragrance oils, do take a look at the links below!

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