Quite often, we have customers who ask “what is the difference between fragrance oils and essential oils”?
Most pure essential oils are extracted from plants through steam distillation. Freshly picked plants are suspended over boiling water, and the steam pulls the oils out of the plant. The steam rises, is captured in a vessel, and is pushed along tubing. Then the steam is rapidly cooled, causing it to condense back into water. Since water and essential oils do not mix, the two separate, and the essential oil is collected. There are other methods of extraction but distillation is the most common. Essential oils have great health benefits!
Fragrance oils are a mixture composed of essential oils, synthetic aroma chemicals, and aromatic resins. In order to achieve the scent that a perfumist is trying to achieve, the perfumist has more than 3000 different fragrance ingredients that s/he may use (natural and synthetic). These ingredients come in the form of liquid, powder, or crystalline.
For example… there is another soap company that makes Pumpkin Spice Soap and they were touting the benefits of pumpkin for skin and health. However, upon further inspection of the ingredients of their product, we found there is NO actual pumpkin (or essential oil) in their soap, they use a pumpkin fragrance oil which does NOT have the same health benefits of essential oil or fresh pumpkin.
We have products that are made with both essential oils and fragrance oils. We always use essential oils whenever we can. Many of our combination fragrances contain more than one essential oil, but all fragrances aren’t available in essential oils… therefore, synthetic fragrance oils are used. We are very particular about the fragrances we use in our products, if it doesn’t smell EXACTLY like the name of the fragrance, then it has no place in our products!
If you are purchasing one of our products made with fragrance oils, (our goat milk soap for example) you still benefit from the amazing all natural ingredients and goats milk from our own does milked right here at the farm! We have the best goats milk soap and body care products in the Universe!