Essential Oils Shopping Guide – Where to Buy Essential Oils?
Where to buy essential oils? You may have heard a lot about the healing properties of essential oils. Different types of essential oils have different health benefits.
So, if you’re about to buy an essential oil for your health condition, it’s better to understand a few facts. Not all essential oils are original, pure and safe. You need to be watchful while buying an essential oil for you.
Facts about Essential Oils
You must have come across a strong yet soothing and organic fragrance emanating from a person or an object. The fragrance may be of essential oil. Essential oils are concentrated volatile agents extracted from aromatic plants.
These oils are used for various purposes like:
- Beauty care
- Medicinal treatment
- Aromatherapy
- Candle making
- Soap making
- Cleaning products like shampoo, air freshener, perfumes, etc.
People are stressing more about organic products these days and want to replace chemically laden products with the organic ones. The same goes for essential oils.
To get the purest form of it you should know where to buy essential oil from? This article will help you in your hunt for the best suitable essential oil.
Related Reading: 12 Essential Oils to Treat Arthritis, Joint Pain and Inflammation
Where to Buy Essential Oils?
Before we look into where to buy essential oil, let’s understand a little about essential oils. It will help you gauge better the places where to buy essential oils.
What Are Essential Oils and How to Identify Them?
An essential oil is extracted from aromatic plants; specifically from the flowers, stems, barks, roots, and seeds of the plants.
It is nearly impossible to authenticate essential oils from their fragrance, even the experts fail sometimes. But there is a simple test that allows you to buy pure essential oil. Take a drop of oil and put it on a paper and allow it to dry.
Once it dries, check if the stain remains. If it does, then it not the best essential oil and there are some vegetable oils mixed with it.
Methods of Essential Oil Extraction
The essential oils are graded depending on the extraction process. The oil extraction processes are listed below:
1. Cold Pressed
This technique is mostly applied to citrus plants to extract oils from the skin of its fruits. It can be done manually as well as with the help of technology.
To extract the oil manually, the fruit is pressed with a sponge. This saturates the fruit with the oil.
Mechanically, the oil is separated from the mixture of oil and juice. Oils obtained through this process are considered the best as they are not heat processed and so they retain their natural aroma.
Nevertheless, this method is suitable for very few plants. Cold pressed oils are undoubtedly the best essential oils available in the market.
2. Steam Distilled
In this method, all the raw materials are kept in a closed container and steam is passed through it. This vaporizes the oils and they rise above to pass into a condensation chamber. The oil vapor and water vapor turn into liquid. As oils weigh lighter than water, they form an upper layer.
This method ensures that the raw material is not heated to the boiling point and so this helps retain the natural essence of essential oils. Therefore, this method is considered next best after cold pressed.
This process is implemented to obtain sandalwood, rose, lavender, peppermint, eucalyptus, etc essential oils. Usually, the best essential oil brands in the market are steam distilled.
3. Solvent Extracted
This procedure uses an appropriate solvent that binds with the oils through the raw components. Then the solvent is separated/ evaporated to get the essential oil.
Alcohol is the highest used solvent which is also easily available. Contemporary procedures also involve using compounds like propane, acetone, and hexane. This method does not fetch pure oils as there are some toxic remains of the used solvent.
Thus when you buy pure essential oil, you have to consider the method of extraction.
Related Reading: How to Use Essential Oils for Nausea?
Essential Oils: How to Buy?
When essential oils are concerned, your biggest shopping problem is ‘where to buy essential oil?’ You need first to ask yourself the purpose of buying essential oils.
If you want to use it in candles, soaps, aromatherapy or cleaning products, then you can buy these oils at reasonable cost from perfume shops, cosmetic shops, departmental stores, medical stores, supermarkets, and hypermarkets. But many of them have added synthetic solvents.
Where Can I Buy Essential Oil?
Your query ‘where can I buy essential oil’ can be somewhat solved if you read the contents of the oils on the packaging.
Again you have to keep in mind that there is nothing like ‘therapeutic oils’. So if you read such labels on the oils, you have to check with the seller.
This can enable you to buy best essential oil brands which have more organic compounds. Avoid purchasing ‘fragrance oils’ and ‘perfume oils’ as these are not pure.
If you want to use the essential oils for the well being of your children, family, or pets then you must opt for best essential oil brands. Don’t miss out on reading the crop name from which the oil is extracted.
At times fake sellers extract the oils from wild plants rather than organic crops. This makes the oils impure. You must buy organic oils which are pure.
Check for an authentic certification. There are many companies claiming absolutely pure essential oils but are they not pure.
Related Reading: 10 Essential Oils for Cough or Cold and How to Use them
How to Buy the Best Essential Oil?
Original essential oils are well distilled and tested and have no solvents added to them. To buy the best essential oil opt for oil of reputed companies or brands.
You can also seek an opinion of aromatherapists or people who regularly use essential oils as to how to buy essential oils.
100% pure essential oils last for about two years and the ones made by mixing solvents wear off sooner.
Moreover essential oils come in a number of fragrance varieties such as orange, rose, lemon, lavender, rosemary, eucalyptus, clove, etc.
Amazon has some super essential oil brands. You can also bank on Walmart and Costco. They provide at a more reasonable price than the market price.
But again you should avoid brands offering lucrative discounts or mega offers on essential oils.
What Should You Know Before Buying Essential Oil?
Choosing the places where to buy essential oils can get a little tricky. If a shop claims to sell a particular essential oil, for, eg. rosemary, then it can be Moroccan as well as German, both of which have completely different properties.
So you need to ensure the common name along with the Latin name of the oil.
‘How to buy essential oils’ hugely depends on verification of scientific name of the essential oil. There are many plants that have the same fruit name but are entirely different, like mandarin orange and sweet orange.
The exact source of extraction of essential oil must be checked. There are different essential oils made from the various parts of a plant such as leaves, bark, fruit, stem, etc.
All contain varied composition. So always check if the part of the plant is mentioned on its packaging.
This article can be your mini guide to ‘Where to buy essential oils’. Hope the next time you shop, you are able to identify the best and purest essential oil.
Sources:
Sierra Bright, “The total guide to buying essential oils- 5 brands you can trust”, Natural Living Ideas web site, September 29, 2016;http://www.naturallivingideas.com/buying-essential-oils/.
“Where to buy Essential Oils? Here is everything to consider”, Experience Essential oils web site, last accessed Jan 14, 2018;http://www.experience-essential-oils.com/where-to-buy-essential-oils.html.
