Organic Essential Oils storage and shelf life
Tags- Organic Essential Oils, shelf life, storage, oxidation, moisture
This short write-up is designed to address an issue, which has been frequently discussed- but still there seems to to be a lot of confusion around.
Essential Oils are a classified under NCS [Natural Complex Substances]- they are volatile plant metabolites, derived out of the plant parts by steam distillation.
Most of these NCS organic molecules are HIGHLY PRONE to oxidation.
Anything that prevents the exposure of an essential oil to "Oxygen" and "Moisture" helps to increase the shelf life.
A convenient technique is to re-pack your oils in small airtight bottles, making sure that you fill them up till the brim, so that there is no air inside the bottle. If possible, flush your oils with nitrogen [which is non-reactive and replaces any traces of oxygen]. Keep your bottles sealed. They should be air tight.
Smaller bottles ensures that you use up the contents in a shorter span of time, thus avoiding incidence of "rancid" note. Use one bottle at a time.
As a farmer another issue that we need to tackle is the "moisture content" in the oil, which again is detrimental to the quality of the oil.
Water, as "itself" does not normally react with the essential oils- in fact steam distillation is done using water.
However, moisture [water] in the oil, because of hydrolysis [which is a vey slow process], provides "active oxygen", which spoils the oil. The technique here is to de-hydrate the essential oil fully, before filtering and packing- again in AIRTIGHT containers, filled till the top.
So if you have AIRTIGHT bottles, filled till the top, you can keep your essential oils for years.
But yes, once you have opened a bottle, try using it up as soon as you can
Regards,
Gurpreet