Essential oil chemistry
Have you ever heard the term essential oil chemistry? Or organic chemistry?
A large part of aromatherapy is the chemistry aspect, and while the average person doesn’t really need to know what that entails and all the ins and outs of essential oil chemistry it’s still good to know the basics. This helps to understand the essential oils, what they are made of and how certain oils can be effective for certain things.
So what is essential oil chemistry? What are essential oils? Why is this important to know?
“An essential oil is a concentrated hydrophobic liquid containing volatile chemical compounds from plants. Essential oils are also known as volatile oils, ethereal oils, aetheroleum, or simply as the oil of the plant from which they were extracted, such as oil of clove.” -Wikepedia
Essential oils are simply extracts from plants, and it’s that reason that chemistry comes into play. Organic chemistry is huge when it comes to the world of plants, and when using essential oils it’s important to have an understanding of what they are made of. Chemistry is defined as “the branch of science that deals with the identification of the substances of which matter is composed; the investigation of their properties and the ways in which they interact, combine, and change; and the use of these processes to form new substances.” So having an understanding of chemistry and the chemistry behind essential oils allows us to understand what they are made of and how we can utilize them safely/effectively in our life.
Essential oils are made up of complicated compounds, constituents and molecules. To really make this easy and understandable I am going to break down some chemistry basics in this blog and go over each Plant Family, characteristics and the basic building blocks to oils in subsequent blog posts. Let’s start with molecule.
“ a group of atoms bonded together, representing the smallest fundamental unit of a chemical compound that can take part in a chemical reaction.”
There are two types of molecules, organic and inorganic. Organic would be living things, and the study of essential oils would fall under organic chemistry. “The constituents of an essential oil are molecules that are structured in a certain way and determine their aroma and therapeutic benefits.” ~Rebecca Park Totilo
Molecules form when 2 or more atoms create a chemical bond and they can be simple or complex. Together these molecules make compounds, which make up the essential oils. They are complex and contain a mix of things that essentially, make them the essential oil.
Okay so I know that’s a lot, trust me some days I still struggle with understanding all of this. We are almost done with the complex chemistry talk though, we just have a few last things to go over. Next we move into Terpene “a molecule (chemical constituent) made up of carbon and hydrogen only.” Terpenes basically make up the back bone to several of the key constituents in essential oils like monoterpenes, sequiterpenes and diterprene. And this gets us started into chemical families, compounds of essential oils and their therapeutic benefits.
“The average essential oil contains around 100-300 components” “In fact the specific chemistry of an individual essential oils is influenced by such a diverse range of factors that it’s impossible to synthetically recreate its components.” ~Rebecca Park Totilo
To end this I will list the plant families and chemical groups of essential oils and I will start to cover each one in a course of several blog posts to help gain a better understanding of essential oil chemistry.
Botanical Families:
Annonacaea
Asteracca
Burseracea
Cistacaea
Cupressaccae
Geraniaceae
Gramineae
Labiteae
Lauraceae
Myristicacae
Myrtaecae
Oleaceae
Pinaceae
Piperaceae
Rutaceae
Sanralaceae
Umbelliferae
Zingiberaceae
Chemical groups of essential oils:
Hydrocarbons
Monoterpenes
Sesquiterpenes
Diterpenes
Oxygentated compounds
Alcohols
Monoterpenols
Sesquiterpenols
Diterpenols
Phenols
Aldehydes
Ketones
Esters
Oxides
Ethers
Lactones
Botanical families and chemical families are unique to the essential oil and are what make it that oil. The percentage of chemicals an oil contains can vary but there are general rules to this and general numbers for how much of something a certain oil typically contains. There are exceptions to these rules with some oils like Plant Therapy’s Bergamot and Cardomom which contain a large (or in their case, lesser) range of numbers with certain chemicals you would normally see.
This concludes the introduction on essential oil chemistry for now, I shall continue this study starting with botanical families and then going into the chemical compounds. I will try and release a new post every week at least. Sometimes covering multiple families or chemicals if possible. Stay tuned to learn more about essential oils, what they are made of and how they work.
Sources used: Wikipedia, Dictionary.com. Aromahut Level 2 text book by Rebecca Park Totilo alternative sources to check out on essential oil chemistry Essential Oil Safety by Robert Tisserand, Organic Chemistry by John Mcmurry 