From Dr. Doug Corrigan:

When you see a $6.99 price tag on a big bottle of essential oil at Target, Amazon, Walmart, or any other vendor, it’s quite natural to feel tempted to purchase it and use it throughout your home. After all, oil is oil, right? Well, like most things, the story is much more complicated than that.

What’s to stop a company from artificially synthesizing some of the constituents found in an essential oil and then using these synthesized constituents to approximate a natural essential oil through reconstitution? What’s to stop a company from using these cheaper and more readily available forms of the constituents to adulterate a natural oil to increase their profits? Nothing.

These types of games are routinely played.

The chemistry of artificially synthesizing molecules that replicate the scents of natural sources has been developed extensively by the perfume, scent, and flavoring industries, which are gargantuan. The infrastructure is extensive and the chemistry is well-established, making this pathway the cheaper option.

To give you an example: In the picture below I show you how they can take turpentine, derived from pine trees, and then chemically convert that to many of the terpenes that are found naturally in essential oils. They can then use these compounds to build an oil completely from scratch; or they can use any one of these artificial constituents to adulterate a natural essential oil to make it cheaper.

For the chemistry geeks who want to keep following along, they take resin from pine trees, and steam distill it to extract turpentine. Turpentine is mainly a mixture of alpha and beta pinene. They fractionally distill the beta-pinene and then use this to produce myrcene. To convert pine to myrcene, they use a process called “pyrolysis”, which takes place at very high temperatures (above 700F). It’s these high temperatures where the problems arise. Toxic compounds are produced at these high temperatures, just like in vaping.

To the right I list out a host of these products that are produced from this high temperature conversion process. On the bottom right, I show the detailed chemical pathways that lead to these decomposition products. They then take myrcene (along with all of the other unwanted byproducts) and produce menthol, citral, citronellal, geraniol, nerol, and linalool, among others. These then find there way into the perfume industry, and yes, you guessed it, into a cheap bottle of oil.

Now some of those decomposition products sound harmless. Pinene, limonene, etc. Well, do you notice three different forms of Xylene on the list? Xylene is a very harsh and toxic organic solvent that’s chemically derived from petroleum. Inhaling xylene vapor leads to depression of the central nervous system, delayed reaction time, nausea, vomiting and headaches. This can occur at very low exposure limits, as low as 100 parts per million. The Xylene component can make up more than 1% of the final myrcene mix after the pyrolysis reaction is completed. How much of that xylene makes it into the final “Essential Oils R Us. ” bottle is anyone’s guess.

This is typical with artificial synthetic chemistry. You always end up with a host of unwanted compounds. Every one of those compounds can make it into the final product, and they don’t have to inform you about these impurities on the label.

Please make sure you know your company and the processes that are being used to produce your essential oil. Your health literally depends on it.

Btw, I have over 70 articles like this in my Frequently Asked Questions Database for Essential Oils. You can access the entire database here —-> www.starfishscents.com/listing/547717651/