Quality Essential Oil Buying Tips 2

Tips for the Essential Oil Enthusiast for Buying the Highest Quality Pure Essential Oils continued

The aroma of the oils may be broken down into three levels: top notes, middle and base. Individual chemical odors can be discerned by a trained nose. For example, a trained nose will pick out a Linalyl acetate. This fragrance has a floral cucumber-melon odor, and is an ester as top note. A person is able to establish certain smells after he or she has routinely smelled a chemical in isolation. This situation can be compared to picking out certain odors from a bowl of fruit; such as when you can decipher the smells of the oranges from the grapefruits.

The oil should be left on the well-marked testing strip and then come back to it at different times. The oil that is tested will determine the particular time periods.

The weight per mile density of the oil should be evaluated. All oils contain a density relative to water. For example, if the density is 1, Clove, Cinnamon and Myrrh oils should be greater than 1. There are many reasons (discussed below) why the density would be a plus or minus.

The gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy (A GC-MS) should be run. A GC is actually an oven with a capillary column which is 25 to 60 meters long, in which the oil is injected. When the temperature in the oven rises, it will cause the more volatile chemicals, which are lighter in weight, to leave the column where they are hit with an electron beam in the MS. This shattered chemical image is copied onto an electromagnetic plate. The image is then stored in the computer. The computer software contains the spectrums which corresponds with a collection of spectrums after the chemical from the oil have been run. These matches are made with quality percentages in which the quality normally matches over 90%. You should develop your own collections with your own methods, such as temperature profile, column type same GC-MS. When you are easily able to identify the individual spectrum patterns, it will be the same as being able to identify the various smells, yet visually.

Many companies use GC with MS, which is not efficient because only the relative percentages of essential oil elements are analyzed by retention time. Retention time is the time in which a chemical comes out of the column, and thus, there may be four or five chemicals that have the same retention time. This equates to a mere one in five chance of being accurate. Good results could happen with this method, but it is much better to have quantitative analysis performed in conjunction with CC-MS.

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