Aromatherapy Essential Oils - extracting them from plants, gently
July 30th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed
The aim with the extraction methods for essentials oils is that the methods used are as gentle as possible. The oils are very delicate, and harsh chemicals can change their structure. They can also leave residues, which would make the oils unsuitable for aromatherapy.
One very popular method of extracting essential oils for aromatherapy is called distillation.
Distillation is the process of using steam to extract the oil and then rapidly cooling the steam back into water form. Since essential oils and water do not mix it is easy to get the essential oil out of the resulting mixture causing the resulting product to be very pure.
The more common essential oils such as peppermint and lavender are extracted using distillation.
The water created as a byproduct of the distillation process is also very popular among those that use aromatherapy essential oils and those byproducts are called hydrosols. Hydrosols such as rose water are extremely popular as skin care products.
Technorati Tags: distillation, essential oils
Related Tags: essential oils
Learn Aromatherapy