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Using essential oils as your fragrance is a great way to turn what would otherwise just be a 'perception-only' ingredient into an ingredient with the real capacity to bring something positive to the formula. It's not that synthetic fragrances are bad, they give formulators and brand owners a lot of creative freedom, are often very stable, can be formulated with the specifics of a formula or target audience in mind and have great batch-to-batch uniformity but at the end of the day a synthetic fragrance just makes a product smell good whereas essential oils can actually do good.

The term 'therapeutic grade oil' has become quite popular over the last five or so years but it has no legal or measurable definition and as such is a term of limited value.

The other week I was talking to a client who was looking for confirmation of the Beta Caryophyllene content of the Copaifera Multijuga Resin Oil that we sell. I looked this up and dutifully found the batch we had in store to contain 45% of said aroma chemical. Curious to know why this particular chemical was of importance I asked a few questions and soon discovered that this chemical is thought to be able to bind to a particular cannabinoid receptor that we have in our bodies. I am guessing that some people were then drawn to make the conclusion that the presence of this chemical must mean Copaifera resin oil can affect your mood - maybe a relaxant or a 'feel good' chemical. I wanted to find out if that was indeed possible, especially given that quite a lot of people look to essential oils as mood enhancers.

The saying that 'nothing lasts forever' is partially true for essential oils. While some actually seem to get better with age, others will fair much, much worse and start smelling flat and generally causing trouble. What we want to know is who, what, where, when and how? Most of all we want to know if there is any science behind the common advice of storing in a 'cool, dry place' or the other favourite 'put them in the fridge'.

We've all been there, created a beautiful bubble bath, body wash or shampoo only to have it fall apart the moment we pop in our Essential oils. While this sort of thing doesn't exactly come as a huge surprise - essential oils are volatile mixtures and are prone to wreaking havoc in a formula - we thought it was time to take a closer look at the situation and so we did.

There were 28,000 tonnes of essential oils grown globally in 2012 - TWENTY EIGHT THOUSAND TONNES!Wow.Breaking that down by region we get the following and as you can see, the bulk of production volume is concentrated in a very small number of essential oils - the usual 80/20 rule (80% of volume from 20% of oils)...

As wonderful as natural oils are their beauty doesn't last forever and over time they can become smelly and flat looking. You may have noticed that some seem to suffer this fate more quickly than others and you would be right, it's all to do with the chemistry you see!

Inspiration is not something that New Directions customers lack and for many it is the prospect of lazing around in their very own 'hand-made' spa-at-home that keeps them coming back for more. However, turning our starter bases into a feast for the senses doesn't always come easy and that's what we want to talk about here.

In today's society we tend to live stressful lifestyles with little time for ourselves. Stress can be a catalyst to many discomforts to our physical being. Aromatherapy can help relieve many common physical ailments as well as help us maintain emotional stability. Here are some suggested ways of introducing essential oils to our everyday life.

Fragrance compounds in perfumes will degrade or break down if improperly stored in the presence of:

• Heat Light
• Oxygen
• Extraneous organic materials