You may have heard the terms ‘essential oils’ and ‘synthetic fragrance’ or ‘perfume’

What do they mean and why does it matter which are in your candles and soaps?

Essential oils are made from plants

The essential oil of a plant can be extracted by either steam distilling or cold-pressing. Oils can be extracted in this way from the flowers, leaves, roots, seeds, bark, stems, skins, resins, or other plant parts.

This requires growing and harvesting real plants all over the world. Skilled work is involved in every stage of growing and then extracting the oils from different plants. There is no ‘one size fits all’ extraction process for essential oils, the part of the plant and the method used differs depending on the properties of the plant.

The essential oils I use in my candles and soaps are sourced from all over the world. Wherever a plant naturally thrives is where a local industry of growing, harvesting and processing that plant to make essential oil will pop up, eg. Sri Lankan Cinnamon Bark, French Lavender, Nordic Spruce etc.

Synthetic fragrance is made from petrochemicals

Synthetic fragrances are cheaper to manufacture than essential oils as they are largely made of petrochemicals. Often these are byproducts of the crude oil refining industry.

This enables large batches of fragrance oils to be made inexpensively. They are often designed for use in a specific product eg. candles/soap/myriad other household and industrial goods. The result is a cheaper product, suitable for mass production.