Jots and Thoughts

One of the reasons for our love affair with personal care and home fragrance products is our abiding attraction toward scents.  Whenever possible, we use naturally extracted scents for their authenticity, allure, and complexity.  For scents that don’t lend themselves to natural extraction due to the fragility of the fragrance components and/or the prohibitive costs, we use phthalate-free fragrance oils.  Our lotions, lip balms, facial products, and deodorants (i.e. any product that stays on the skin) are naturally scented, and we refer to the scent components in their ingredients list variously as essential oils, absolutes, resins, distillates, etc.

In this jot we aim to explain what these terms mean and how natural scents are derived.   The terms are typically associated with the method of extraction of the scent components.

Essential oils are scent extracts derived from plants by distillation or by mechanical pressing.  Distillation entails heating the plant material to vaporize the volatile fragrant components then cooling the vapor to collect them as a liquid or a solid distillate.  For example, lavender essential oil is obtained by steam distillation in which steam is injected into a vessel containing lavender buds.  The steam heats up and breaks down the plant material, and carries with it the volatile fragrant oils in the plant.  The mixture of steam and oils is then condensed back into a liquid and separated.  The oil thus obtained is lavender essential oil.  The water phase contains water-soluble fragrant components of lavender and is dubbed lavender distillate or hydrosol, or more colloquially as “lavender water”.  We use this hydrosol in our facial mists.

Oils obtained by mechanical pressing (also known as cold pressing or expression) include citrus essential oils. The peel of the citrus fruit or sometimes the entire fruit is pressed to rupture the oil-containing cells and release the essential oils.  If entire fruits are used, the mixture is then centrifuged to separate the oil from the aqueous phase.  Orange, grapefruit, lemon, tangerine, mandarin, and other citrus essential oils are obtained by this method.

The fragrant components of certain plants are too delicate for steam distillation and too scarce for mechanical pressing.  Solvents such as volatile hydrocarbons (e.g. alcohol and hexane), solid oil or fat, or supercritical carbon dioxide (which is a liquid) are then used to extract the oils in a gentle fashion.  For example, to obtain jasmine absolute, fresh jasmine blossoms collected early in the morning are laid onto thin substrates coated with a solid oil/fat. Over 1-2 days, the fragrant components from the flowers are transferred to the oils.  The old blossoms are then replaced with fresh-picked ones until the solid oil is saturated.  This solid product is known as the concrete (or pomade) and contains non-fragrant wax and other plant material in addition to the fragrant components.  A volatile solvent such as alcohol or hexane is then used to extract the fragrant oils from the concrete.  After the volatile solvent is evaporated off, the resulting product is known as the absolute.  Absolutes tend to be richer and more concentrated and complex than essential oils derived by distillation or cold processing; their cost is commensurately higher.

Resins, such as benzoin and frankincense resins, are extruded from trees by slashing the bark and collecting the sap.  These resins are often very thick and difficult to work with and are sometimes converted to essential oils by steam distillation or to a more fluid resin by solvent extraction.

Through the above extraction methods, we are able to experience a portion of the bounty of scents from nature even when we are not within smelling distance of the actual plant.  In this way we have discovered the scents of plants in lands we have not yet seen.  If you have a favorite essential oil, absolute or resin, we would love to hear more about it.  We always relish a new olfactory treat.

Perhaps you embrace the natural and organic trend in beauty products (we are on the same page) or perhaps you scoff at the use of the word “natural” (we applaud your critical thinking because, yes, uranium occurs naturally too); regardless, we thought we would clarify what we mean by “all natural” and “natural” when we talk about our products.

To us, natural ingredients are ingredients obtained from renewable sources, typically plants, but in some cases such as beeswax, from animals. They should be minimally processed. By this definition, petroleum products, while they are obtained from Mother Earth, are not considered natural. Minerals, such as titanium dioxide and mica, may be mined from the ground rather than synthesized in the lab (synthetic examples would be FD&C colors) but have to be processed to become suitable for cosmetic use. The processing is for a good reason: to control consistency, heavy metal content and impurities. We believe minerals are better alternatives to FD&C colors and artificial dyes, but we do not consider minerals and mineral makeup to be completely natural but nature-identical.

So if we say a product is “all natural” or “natural” what do we mean?

• If we are bold enough to call something all natural, we mean that 100% of the ingredients are from plant or animal sources, right down to the scent/flavor. The only animal ingredients we use are beeswax, honey, and milk.
• If a product is described as natural, it is primarily created with natural ingredients but may be complemented with nature-identical ingredients such as vitamin B3, vitamin C, lactic acid, and hyaluronic acid that could be harvested from natural sources but are more safely and feasibly obtained from manufactured sources. (Side note: you could naturally source hyaluronic acid and collagen from marine life, cows and other animals, but we would much rather get it from the fermentation products of cells in a bioreactor, which is similar to how insulin is made.)
• If a product is not labeled as all natural or natural, please know that it is still created primarily of natural and nature-identical ingredients, but may contain synthetics such as: 
  • emulsifiers – to bind the oil and water phases together in a lotion or cream product
  • actives – such as sunscreens, anti-acne and anti-wrinkle agents
  • preservatives – to keep your product safe from the growth of microorganisms; we keep to paraben-free preservatives
  • fragrances – we go to great lengths to find natural, exotic scents but some intriguing ones are simply impossible to harvest from nature so we have chosen to use phthalate-free versions 

Coming from a science background, we are particularly conscious of when an ingredient is considered a synthetic versus a natural one. We are dismayed sometimes to come across products touted as “natural” when they use a conventional formulation with the same old petroleum-based ingredients but add a few interesting plant extracts.  We do not use a cut-off of 70% or 80% natural ingredients to equal natural. And while we use a number of organic ingredients in our products, we have not applied for organic certification and cannot market our products as organic.

We welcome your questions and thoughts. We realize you give us your trust when you use our products and we are earnest about being truthful with what we do.