Essential Oils Vs Fragrance Oils

At the start of my soapmaking journey I was excited to work with essential oils, and believed natural was better and safer. This may be partially due to the person I learnt off only worked with natural essential oils, clays and natural colourants.

However my driving belief was always that you deserve to have the bathing experience you want, and deserve.  If that meant using a soap that smelled like pina colada made your day that little bit better, then darn it, use that soap!

So, in essence, I wanted to be able to offer my customers a choice of soap fragranced naturally with essential oils, but also those yummy scents scented with fragrance oils.

I soon found out the hard way that working with essential oils is not the easy option. The plant extracts can be extremely fragile, and soapmaking is a very harsh environment. There's a chemical reaction involved when the sodium hydroxide solution mixes with the fats and oils turning them to a salt (the soap) and glycerin.

Sometimes the essential oils wouldn't come through the soapmaking process very well. I know other soap makers try to keep the soap cool to preserve the scent profile, but living in the tropics, it just wasn't an option for me. Most times my soaps go through gel phase (get very hot, up to 200 degrees Celcius) by themselves.

So I persevered with essential oils, with some success, only to find a few months later that the soaps had no real scent retention. This was extremely frustrating as the essential oils aren't cheap.

I was about a year and a half in when I was reviewing soaps I had made a year before. All the essential oils soaps had completely lost their scent, most of the soaps using good quality fragrance oils were still going strong.

That's when my opinions started to shift.

For my purpose, maybe essential oils aren't necessarily better. 

As I've become slightly better at making nicer looking soaps, it has crossed my mind that some you might not want to use the soap right away, you may want to display it for a bit. I'm not going to let you be upset when you actually use it that the scent has disappeared. 

Also, without testing, there is no guarantee of what compounds are actually in the essential oils, that's the reason I have to put a warning label on for pregnant women. (I live in one of the main fruit and vegetable growing regions and believe me when I say there are constantly small planes spraying goodness knows what on all the fields around me)

All fragrance oils are tested and safe amounts to be used are recommended by the manufacturer.

I'm not against revisiting using essential oils in my soapmaking, but I need to do a lot more research. Please note, I am not knocking any other soap makers using essential oils,  or products made using essential oils, in fact I look up to them. 

Those are the reasons I have started using more fragrance oils than essential oils. The scent retention being the main reason. Also the fragrance oils have the most beautiful scent options.

 I want to be able to share a very high quality product with you, and fragrance oils are the best option for me to do this right now. This may change in the future once I become better at my craft but for now this is where I'm at.

Thankyou for reading if you made it this far, I appreciate you spending your precious time here,

 Thanks, Emma xxx