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. For a repellent, though, I want a GC-MS analysis of the batch: without it, I can't be sure of the actual composition, and therefore of its effectiveness.

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.

Pierre Franchomme, who introduced the concept of chemotype in aromatherapy, points out that the same botanical species can yield oils with radically different biochemical compositions depending on terroir, climate, and harvest timing, and therefore radically different appropriate uses. That idea sits at the core of how I think about this: two lavenders can share the same Latin name and still not deserve the same task.

Dominique Baudoux, a pharmacist and co-founder of Pranarôm, champions what's often called "scientific" aromatherapy, where an oil's precise chemotype determines both its efficacy and its safety margin. In his view, a poorly identified oil isn't just weaker, it can be unsuited, even risky, for the therapeutic use it's being asked to perform. That's exactly why I reserve the strictest traceability for tier 1.

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.

Julia Lawless, as an encyclopedist of essential oils, insists on botanical authenticity and origin before even describing an oil's uses: without certainty about what the oil actually is, any discussion of how to use it doesn't hold up.

Light and Bryan Miller, working from an Ayurvedic perspective, choose an essential oil based on a person's constitution and context, not a universal quality hierarchy: another way of saying that appropriateness beats prestige.

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

And on the perfumery side, Steffen Arctander remains the reference for classifying natural aromatic materials by olfactory profile rather than therapeutic virtue. His work illustrates the line between tier 2 and tier 1 well: an oil can be exceptional to the nose without that being the same traceability bar that qualifies it for skin.

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.