Grade A?

Companies love to try to set themselves apart from the competition by giving their product a fancy name, many times with standard after it. A good example of standard are standards given to food and drugs and those standards didn't stop the harm done. A name is not the person, place or thing, even though many people don't want to look any further than the name.

Anyone giving such a grade to Essential oils could be part of a quango: quasi-autonomous national government (or non governmental) organization, self interest group. As you know most organization are set up by the companies or people who have vested interest.

How many organization are as altruistic and selfless as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam, Red Cross?

The FDA or The Trading Standards are not testing every essential oil to find out whether the essential oil is natural and unadulterated. They could not and will not because essential oils are one of the most complex products on the earth and proper testing cost around £400 per sample: if you are doing what we are doing. Even if you were doing just a Gc-Ms without the head space analysis a test contract for 200 samples a year could cost around £250 per sample. Yes you can get cheaper test done, but that's exactly what you get cheap.

We do not do cheap and cheerful test at Kobashi. We test to isolate, as many chemical as possible. We test for phthalate, pesticide and herbicide contamination. We test for chemical composition and relative percentages.

The FDA or The Trading Standards may test an oil if you had evidence that an essential oil is marked Pure or 100% essential oil and was not 100% Pure essential Oil. All our essential oils that are marked this way, are what we say they are and if anyone wants to send them to a lab to see we welcome it.

Just as in athlete drug testing, there is testing and there is testing. Cheap and cheerful gc's for some.

To us at Kobashi a FID GC (Flame ionized detector, Gas chromatography) is a hit or miss Russian Roulette, that is very good for relative percentages. Why is a FID GC hit or miss? Don't trust GC analysis alone. Many companies just use GC without the MS (mass spectroscopy). This is dangerous even if you have a complete library of standards, which very few people on earth have. GC’s are good for a cheap and cheerful look at the relative percentages of components in an oil, but they are only analyzed by retention time. (Retention time: the time a chemical comes out of the GC’s column) There can be four or five chemicals which have the same retention time, thus a 1-5 chance of being correct. This is not to say that rentention time is not important as certain isomer of chemical are found at differnent retention times and GC-MS will not show much difference in the ion patterns. This is not to say a well trained analyst cannot have good results, using cross cutting with two columns: a less polar and more polar column. It means that quantitative analysis is better performed in conjunction with Gc-Ms.) FID GC. Even a Gc-Ms with only the main components analyzed is not worth much more than the paper it is written on, if you want to know about contaminates, as most are found at low levels.

High resolution Gc-Ms, in depth ion pattern, peak purity analysis of every possible chemical in conjunction with retention time, in the essential oil, will get you closest to the truth.

Question: Are the oils suitable for taking internally?

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