Welcome to The Perfect Essence! Our mission is two-fold:
To help you develop, expand or otherwise improve your essential oil related business through consulting services, thus creating a synergy between your company and ours; and
To bring you uniquely inspired essential oil blends for your personal enjoyment and to provide a select number of rare essential oils for your blending requirements.
Essential oils, aromatherapy and natural perfumery are our passion and we have the expertise to assist you in reaching your fragrant goals.
Aromatherapy is the use of essential oils for the purpose of creating wellness in our lives. This includes assisting the mental and emotional state of a person as well as bringing healing to the physical body. There are many ways to utilize essential oils and essential oil blends in our daily life and also ways to use them in specific, short-term healing programs. When used therapeutically, we suggest applying essential oils in combination with diet, exercise and other lifestyle changes, as well as complimentary healing modalities such as acupuncture, naturopathy, etc. thus creating a healthy lifestyle and a balance between the mental, emotional, spiritual side of life with the physical body.
Aromatherapy could perhaps be better called essential oil therapy because it is much more than the just the aroma of essential oils that is therapeutic. Essential oils are, by their nature, very complex and the way that they work in the body is also complex and not completely understood. However, sometimes it is not a complete understanding that is required. Rather we simply need to use them responsibly and let the balance of nature be restored; for essential oils like herbs are nature’s remedy and they are inherently intelligent. Furthermore, when combined with the natural intelligence of the body, essential oils and other plant medicines know how to bring the body-mind complex back into balance; and that is healing. Our job is to educate ourselves, keep things simple and use genuine and authentic essential oils in the proper amounts and in a safe way, letting them and body do the work.
Natural Perfumery, along with aromatherapy, is one of our passions. Natural or botanical perfumery is an art and science where the perfumer uses natural, fragrant raw materials to create unique combinations that capture an aesthetic quality of beauty in aroma. Natural perfumes, by definition, do not contain any synthetic ingredients like almost every modern day perfume does, as well as most modern day household products from bodycare and cleaning products, polishes, colognes and toiletries all the way to processed foods and beverages. Natural perfumery, therefore is also involved in education since most people have a poor olfactory intelligence and often times are not able to distinguish natural from synthetic aromatics, and even may prefer a synthetic aroma over a natural one. As natural perfumers we help people learn how to smell, how to detect synthetic aromas and help them to fall in love with natural aromas and, by extension, to the natural world.
In order to create beautiful natural perfumes a deep understanding of essential oils, absolutes, resinoids and other natural aromatic ingredients is necessary. Additionally, the best quality aromatics must be sourced and utilized in order to create great natual perfumes. Botanical perfumes are created in layers or accords where similar notes are combined and aged and then later brought together in specific ratios to engender a final achievement of grace, allure and great beauty.
Essential oils are the essence, or life force of an aromatic plant that results from distillation. Essential oils are, by their nature, volatile, aromatic and typically composed of hundreds of different chemical constituents. To describe essential oils is not an easy thing to do. Do I offer the perspective of a chemist, an alchemist, a plant physiologist, an aromatherapist, natural perfumer, distiller or do I propose to speak for the plants themselves? Each view would tell a different and quite interesting story – which would fill a book or two. To a plant physiologist essential oils are a class of secondary plant metabolite, meaning that they are produced by plants through the metabolic processes but they are not the primary reason for taking in food, sunlight, carbon dioxide and water. In other words essential oils do not feed the plant, help it grow or are necessary to keep it alive moment to moment. Rather, essential oils are stored within cells and in ducts within plant tissue and used to assist the plant in many other ways such as defense mechanisms (repelling predators of all kinds), attracting pollinators and assisting in the healing of wounds and keeping healthy in the long-term.
Interestingly, though not surprisingly, we also use essential oils for some of these same purposes. But first we need to obtain the essential oil which is a very small part of the plant. We do this almost exclusively by distillation (water, steam or water & steam distillation) where boiling water and/or steam is used to separate the essential oil from the plant tissue and carry the constituents off with the steam which is at that point in a gas phase. Next, the steam goes through a condenser where the gases turn back into liquids and drop into a receiving vessel resulting in the hydrosol (hydrolat, distillation water or flora water) and the essential oil which will typically float on the water and can be separated from the water portion.
The ancient alchemists developed the methodologies in India, China and Persia where later it was performed and perfected in a more scientific way in Europe. Wherever the distillation technique was discovered it was soon realized that the essential oils had many uses and were therefor highly coveted and traded. And as time went on a whole industry has been built around essential oils.
Primary uses of essential oils include food and beverage flavorings, precursors for various products and medicines, perfumery and natural perfumery, ingredients in body care and household products, essential oil therapy (true aromatherapy) and what we might call lifestyle enhancement or the daily use of these precious gems of nature to increase our personal lives.
Similar, and related to essential oils, are absolutes and CO2 extracts both of which contain essential oils in addition to other non-essential oil components of plants. They are extracted using different methods than distilled essential oils and they have similar but slightly different uses than distilled essential oils – such as CO2 extracts make excellent food flavorings and are often used in herbal supplements while absolutes shine as ingredients in perfumes but are not considered to be suitable for therapeutic use in aromatherapy.