Soap making: Fragrance oils vs. essential oils

There are many ways to make soaps and candles (actually they have a lot in common), some of them are almost ancient and inherited by every generation, but a lot of methods are new - they appeared as the technology developed and new chemical were available. The methods are also different from the ones used by our grandparents to make soap.

When you are making soaps and candles and you are interested only how they smell, look and act in targeted environments you might not be interested what ingredients you use, only their quality and safety are important.

But if you are dedicated to make natural products in your home the ingredients become very important. So let's start with the basics:

What is a fragrance oil?

A fragrance oil is a mix of chemical components, some natural from plants and animals, and some synthetic. They are created to mimic an existing scent of nature (the parfume of some plants: lavender, pine, strawberries, bluebonnets) or to create a new scent that can not be found in natural state (love spell, spring rain, various winter scents).

There are over 5,000 raw ingredients that have they own scent or that can be blended together to create a fragrance oil. Some compounds in the fragrance oil may cause a batch of soap or candle to accelerate trace, heat up or separate in the molds and ruin your work... so to thin the various ingredients and to give the final product some uniformity of strength the ingredients are usually diluted with "diluents". 

What is an essential oil?

An essential oil is a made from pure plante distillates and extracts. Sometimes the oil can come from different parts of the plant as some plants contain more than one essential oil. The orange tree is an example. Usually the oil is extracted from the fruit (e.g. the orange), the flower blossom (e.g. neroli) or leaves (e.g. petitgrain). The oils can be extracted using different methods, but the steam distilation is the most common and it usually assured about the hight quality of the products.

Historically, the intence use of essential oils was triggered by the desire of people last century to return to more natural ways (the reasons are many and I don't want to get them into this article, but after all the essential oils means less artificialy created chemicals in our surroundings).

Due to the nature of the essential oils their market price are always changing: it takes a lot of kilograms of plant material (dozen or even hundreds) to make one liter of essential oil.

When you use them you must consider that essential oils are volatile and highly flamable and you must keep them out of reach of children.

Essential oils can be used in making soaps and candles, but they have a lot of other usage in the beauty industry: room sprays, lotions, bath salts and oils, balms etc. They are also the foundation for the whole practice of aromatherapy.