Why essential oils cost more
A kilo of synthetic fragrance oil costs a fraction of a kilo of essential oil. It is stronger in the bar, it survives the curing rack better, and it smells exactly the same in every batch for years. By every commercial measure it is the better choice.
We use the expensive one. This is the honest case for why, including the part where synthetic wins.
What an essential oil actually is
An essential oil is the aromatic fraction of a plant, physically removed from it — usually by steam distillation, sometimes by cold pressing. Nothing is invented. Steam is passed through lavender flowers, the vapour is condensed, and the oil that separates out is lavender. That is the entire process, and it is why an essential oil smells complicated: you are not smelling one molecule, you are smelling a few hundred of them in the ratio the plant grew them in.
The arithmetic
The cost is almost entirely about how much plant it takes.
- Lavender: roughly 130 to 150 kilos of flowers for a single kilo of oil.
- Rose otto: the famous one — several thousand kilos of petals per kilo of oil, hand-picked before the sun is fully up. This is why rose oil is priced like a precious metal.
- Citrus: the affordable end, because tangerine and lemon oils are cold-pressed from peel that the juice industry has already finished with. Cheerful, useful, and a fraction of the cost of a distilled flower oil.
- Tea tree, eucalyptus, cedarwood: the sensible middle, distilled from leaf and wood that yield reasonably well.
Add to that a harvest that varies with the weather, a market price that moves with it, and the fact that a poor season in one growing region can move the price of a note across the whole industry.
What fragrance oil is instead
A fragrance oil is designed in a laboratory from aroma molecules, some synthesised, some plant-derived. It is engineered for a purpose: to smell strong, to smell identical every time, and to survive high pH and a month of curing without fading.
It is also, on a label, allowed to hide. In most markets the single word fragrance or parfum can legally represent a blend of dozens of individual ingredients, protected as a trade secret. You can be a careful reader of labels and still have no idea what you just put on your skin.
That is our actual objection. Not that synthetic molecules are sinister — plenty of them are well studied and perfectly safe — but that the word tells you nothing, and we would rather our label told you everything.
Where synthetic genuinely wins
Three places, and it would be dishonest to skip them.
- Strength. A fragrance oil holds its intensity through the alkaline environment of fresh soap. Essential oils lose some of theirs.
- Longevity. Our citrus bars are at their brightest in the first weeks and settle into something quieter by month three. Tangerine and lemon are volatile — that is chemistry, not a flaw in the bar.
- Consistency. Two batches of our Orange Coffee House will not be molecularly identical, because two harvests of clove are not identical. We think that is a feature. A quality control manager would disagree.
We work with the fade rather than against it. Grounding notes like cedarwood, clove and cinnamon hold on far longer than citrus, which is why they appear alongside the bright oils in Tangerine Bloom and Orange Coffee House — they give the scent something to stand on as the top notes soften.
What is in our bars
Nine oils across four soaps: tangerine, lemon, sweet orange, cedarwood, tea tree, eucalyptus, peppermint, rosemary, cinnamon and clove. Every one of them is named on the product page. There is no tenth ingredient called fragrance, and there never will be.
It costs us more per bar. It is the single easiest place we could save money, and the first place a customer would notice if we did.
