How I Choose My Essential Oils

When an essential oil is going to come into direct contact with a person or an animal, I become extremely selective. I look for oils produced by growers I know, whose farming, harvesting, and distillation methods I actually understand.

Whenever possible, I choose oils that are:

• grown organically;
• harvested with respect;
• distilled close to where the plants are grown;
• fully traceable;
• produced by people fairly compensated for their work.

These are the oils I use for consultations, massage blends, inhalers, skin preparations, and formulations intended to support wellbeing.

Some oils are extraordinary. Wild lavender harvested at high altitude. An old-growth cypress. A rare, hand-harvested helichrysum. Those oils deserve to be experienced, not hidden inside a kitchen cleaner.

They're perfect for:

• perfumery;
• olfactory work;
• meditation;
• inhalers;
• luxury aromatic creations.

Sometimes the aroma itself is the reason to buy the oil.

Now imagine I'm making a kitchen spray, an all-purpose cleaner, an insect repellent, or testing twenty perfume accords in a row. Do I really need a tiny-batch, hand-harvested artisan lavender? Probably not.

Here I'm looking for something different. I still want an authentic oil, correctly identified botanically, and ideally organic, but I don't necessarily need an ultra-premium artisan producer. For this kind of work, there are serious companies with a non-MLM business model and properly traceable organic oils at prices that make sense for practical use. I deliberately don't name them here: that's research I prefer to leave to each person, keeping the same criteria: traceability, botanical identification, transparency about origin.

Organic stays my default even here, as long as the price gap remains reasonable. And I want to be precise rather than oversimplify. Not all pesticide residues behave the same way during distillation: some, with low volatility, remain mostly in the plant material or distillation waters rather than migrating into the essential oil; others, more lipophilic, can end up in the oil in measurable quantities. The reality depends on the specific molecule, not a universal rule. What draws me toward organic isn't therefore the certainty that "every pesticide ends up in the bottle," but a broader concern: soil health, the exposure of the people who harvest and distill, and a fundamental coherence with a practice that claims to respect living things. That said, I wouldn't choose a wild-harvested flower or a hand-collected oil for this tier. And the source doesn't need to be a single producer: lavender sourced from multiple growers and distilled elsewhere works perfectly well for cleaning or repellents.

This way of thinking isn't a personal quirk. Several respected aromatherapists encourage choosing an essential oil according to its use, chemistry, origin, and relationship to the plant, rather than treating all oils as interchangeable. I simply take that idea one step further: I also ask whether an exceptional oil deserves the task I'm giving it.

Jade Shutes, through the School for Aromatic Studies, repeatedly returns to the idea of building a relationship with each essential oil, not with a brand. A relationship to the plant, its chemistry, its origin, its ecology, and its therapeutic action, where a species' conservation status should guide how it's sourced and used.

Robert and Rodney Tisserand, the world's leading safety reference, almost never rank oils by prestige: their work is about choosing the appropriate oil based on efficacy, chemistry, and safety, exactly the mindset defended here.

Kurt Schnaubelt has long written about ecological aromatherapy: treating essential oils as valuable botanical remedies, not interchangeable fragrances.

And perhaps the strongest argument is one of stewardship over a scarce resource: a liter of artisan wild lavender used across 50 therapeutic consultations creates more value than the same liter poured into a bathroom cleaner. That's a conservation principle applied to essential oils : using a precious resource where it creates the greatest value.