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What is the difference between an essential and a fragrant oil?

People often get confused about the difference between an essential oil and a fragrant oil and use their names interchangeably, which should not be done, as they are two very different types of oils, with very different compositions.

A pure essential oil can be extracted from the leaves, flowers, stems, roots or barks of plants. These are not really true oils, but are the volatile essence that has been extracted from the plant.

There are four processes to obtain an essential oil, which are steam distillation, the cold process method, using chemical solvents and the oldest method is enfleurage. Of these four processes, steam distillation is by far the most common extraction method used today as it produces the purest result. But this method uses heat, which may destroy some oils, such as citrus. The cold process method is used for such oils to remove the essence safely without using heat. Chemical solvents are only used if the droplets of oil are too heavy for the distillation method. Enfleurage was used by the Ancient Egyptians and results in a concentrated fragrance cream. They did this by allowing odourless fats and oils to absorb the fragrance from fresh flowers.

Now, on to fragrance oils, which may also be called perfume oils are usually synthetic. A chemist will analyse a plants natural composition and will reproduce the chemical components to create a synthetic oil.

So, to sum it all up an essential oil is a pure essence extracted from a plant, whereas a fragrant oil is a man-made synthetic oil made to replicate the essential oil.