What You Need to Know About Essential Oils and Fragrance Isolates
Fragrances from essential oils and isolates are integral to numerous cherished personal and household products. These categories include toiletries, skincare, cosmetics, hair care, perfumes, and topical wellness applications. They also cover home care, homeware, and food products such as candies.
Essential oils are naturally scented and can be used alone or as part of another product, such as in massage preparations, cosmetics, soaps, and candles. As an alternative, fragrance ingredients can be derived from the same source materials but produced as isolates instead of oils. But where do these nourishing oils and heavenly scents come from? How are they produced?
What Are Essential Oils?
High-quality essential oils are natural, plant-based, concentrated, and impurity-free. As the name suggests, these compound mixtures contain a botanical essence from a plant’s flowers, leaves, seeds, fruit rinds, roots, or bark. These often valuable oils smell lovely and offer potential therapeutic benefits.
Familiar and widely-used essential oils include tea tree, sweet almond, rose, jasmine, sandalwood, patchouli, lavender, bergamot, and vetiver. These oils mix well with each other and other oil-based products and are ideal for creating novel, complex, and unique fragrance profiles.
How Are Essential Oils Produced?
Essential oils are most often created using steam distillation. Flowers, leaves, or bark are placed in a water-filled chamber, which is then heated, generating a steam that extracts and carries the fragrance oil molecules. The steam and oil combination is then condensed, cooled, and liquified. Finally, the essential oil is separated from the water and bottled. Different plants and plant materials produce varying amounts of oil, and the oil quality depends on the purity of the source used.
Additional production methods include expression, where the oil is generated by pressing the plant elements to extract the essence. Another approach is chemical solvent extraction. Advanced Biotech relies on the latest, cutting-edge technologies and techniques to produce superior, EU-certified natural essential oils.
What Are Fragrance Isolates?
Isolates – single chemical compounds – are ideal when a particular scent is needed to create a fragrance profile. This type of ingredient is delicate, offering a single isolated aroma contributor. In addition, isolates are easier to use than essential oils and more stable, consistent, and cost-effective.
Common natural isolates include citronellol – often used as or in insect repellants, patchouli, and eugenol – spicy and perfect for oriental profiles, geraniol and rose oxide – offering rose-like notes for floral fragrances, farnesol – yielding woody and floral undertones, and citral – lending a fresh, lemony scent.
How Are Isolates Produced?
Isolates are created using various methods, depending on the fragrance type and result required. These approaches include steam distillation and solvent or enzymatic extraction. The solvent approach uses ethanol or hexane to dissolve fragrance molecules from plant components, filtering to remove impurities and the solvent through evaporation. The result is a pure and concentrated fragrance isolate. Enzymatic extraction uses enzymes to break plant material down to release its fragrance molecules, which are filtered and concentrated.
Advanced Biotech may use one or a combination of traditional, Avant-Garde, and greener methods to produce pure and natural isolates, a simple fragrance solution for numerous products and applications. In addition, our volume capabilities mean you can rely on receiving the quantities required.
Uplift Your Fragranced Product Portfolio With Advanced Biotech
Our extensive collection of finely and more sustainably produced essential oils and isolates offers a broad choice of reliable and well-documented aroma ingredients to meet your unique fragrance profile goals. So, enhance your aroma outcomes and accentuate your product offering today. Please contact us to discuss your essential oil and isolates needs.