Buying Lavender Oils

This item has been coppied from the Jersey Lavender website www.jerseylavender.co.uk owned by Mr Alastair Christie.

You can buy “lavender” oil from many sources with huge price variations. However, quite often, all is not what it seems - the essential oil business is fraught with pitfalls for the unwary. Some "lavender oil" is of very poor quality, even bordering on being a fraudulent product. 

In bulk commercial trading of essential oils a lot of 'cutting', adulteration, stretching, blending (call it what you like) with other materials takes place. This is fine where buyer and seller know the game, and when the buyer is often looking for a “standardised” fragrance quality year after year, which can only be achieved through these practices.

The problems occur when unaware member of the public, looking for a pure, good quality oil find fall into the following unethical practises that can occur:

• Lavandin oil sold as lavender angustifolia oil (or just vaguely labelled as "lavender oil") or even lavandin blended with the lavender angustifolia - the lavandin is much cheaper. This practise is often not difficult to detect, as you can pick out the stronger camphor odour. Even cheaper than lavandin, oil from Lavandula latifolia (Spike lavender) is sometimes used instead. Such methods of "stretching" lavender occur frequently. You still have a natural product, but if you had read an aromatherapy book and wanted to buy the real angustifolia oil you would not be getting the right quality.

• Pure natural lavender oil diluted with an odourless solvent. This is difficult to detect without specialist analytical equipment.

• Cheap synthetic chemicals blended with the lavender oil. This happens a lot in the bulk commodity trade to "standardise" an oil to particular percentages of the key components. The natural versions of the synthetic chemicals are in the oil anyway, so this type of blending is difficult to detect without specialist equipment.

A cheap lavender oil may employ any of or all of the three “con” tricks above. The most common situation is the first one and the worst-case scenario is where an entirely synthetic lavender fragrance is sold as an essential oil. Modern analytical chemistry has got us to the point where this is possible – a really cheap, "reconstituted" lavender oil might not have a single component that has been derived from a plant source.

To avoid any of the above, my advice is:

- Buy only direct from a lavender growing and distilling source – a lavender farm such as Jersey Lavender. If not, the very least that you should aim for is to buy from a major, reputable high-street brand.

- Only buy oils in metal or dark glass bottles. Never clear glass.

- Look for a clear botanical name on the bottle. For example "lavandula angustifolia" or "lavandula x intermedia". Good, ethical producers and marketers of lavender oil will always label with the botanical source.

- Do not buy the cheapest. You get what you pay for, and good quality oils cost money.

- When you buy your oils only purchase what you might use within six months. Referring back to the section on the storage of the oil, it is better to buy a few smaller bottles than one big one as opening and using a small amount of oil each time allows exposure with fresh air (oxygen) which will hasten the degradation of the oil.


I hope my comments have been helpful, but if you have any questions I would be happy to try to answer them. Please use the Contact Us form.

Alastair Christie – 11th November 2006